FARMINGTON — Mt. Blue’s 8-7 baseball win Monday over Brewer won’t be wedged into the categories of neat or picturesque.

Life-preserving measures, or in this case season-saving victories, aren’t usually a sight for general audiences. They do compensate, however, with drama and adrenaline rushes.

Charlie Martin’s single with one out in the bottom of the seventh inning scored Matt Crowley and gave the Cougars the final word at Hippach Field.

Mt. Blue scored two runs in the final frame to rally after giving away a 6-0 lead. Brewer nearly stole it in broad daylight with four runs in the sixth and three in the seventh.

“I can’t say how proud I am of my guys,” Mt. Blue coach Dan Stefanilo said. “They did a great job staying up and scraping across what I thought might be one run, but ended up being two runs and our second walk-off of the year.”

Three Brewer errors and walks by Crowley and Gage Kennedy fueled the finish. Bradley Jackson reached second on a throwing error, raced to third on another miscue and scored on a wild pitch to tie the game before Martin’s heroics.

Martin lined a 2-1 offering from Tony Bissell, Brewer’s third pitcher, into right field. Crowley, who originally scratched from the starting lineup when he was late arriving at the park, trotted home from third to touch off a wild celebration.

Both teams are 4-6, and Mt. Blue’s victory clinched a sweep of their KVAC home-and-home series. But while the Witches would have been in the Eastern Class A playoffs if the season ended now, the Cougars were mired next-to-last.

“If we lost we were in a win-out situation,” said Mt. Blue senior Nick Hilton, who wound up the winning pitcher after one topsy-turvy inning of relief. “We would’ve had to win the last six, so this was huge.”

There was not an inkling of such madness through five innings.

Cam Abbott mystified Brewer, threatening to make the game shorter than the Witches’ bus ride. He allowed three singles and went to only one three-ball count, firing an economical 56 pitches.

“I was just finding the spots,” Abbott said. “Then I got a little wild and they started finding the confidence and started hitting.”

Still, six runs seemed more than enough.

Hilton scooted home on a delayed steal in the first inning.

Mt. Blue added five more in the third. Jordan Whitney curled a towering fly ball inside the left field foul pole at the 315-foot mark for a two-run blast. Andrew Pratt and freshman Colton Lawrence had RBIs. Lawrence later scored on one of Brewer’s six errors.

Back stormed Brewer, sending 10 men to the plate against Abbott and Bradley Jackson in the sixth. The Witches lashed out seven of their 11 hits in that inning, including an RBI double by Jeremy Bissell and run-scoring singles from Matt Morrow and Jeff Weeks.

Two Mt. Blue errors contributed to another run. Jackson coaxed Kyle Alexander into a grounder to shortstop and a fielder’s choice to leave the bases loaded with the Cougars still up 6-4.

Morrow cooled Mt. Blue’s bats through the middle innings in relief of Drew Hutchins. The Cougars also squandered chances to pad the lead, leaving two on base in the fourth, fifth and sixth.

Jackson hit Bissell with a pitch to open the seventh. Hilton was brought in to slam the door, but Nick Moore walked and Morrow reached on a throwing error to deepen the wound.

John Collins’ RBI single made it 6-5. Hilton struck out Weeks, them lured Bissell into a would-be game-ending double play ball to short.

The throw to first was wide, though, enabling both the tying and go-ahead runs to score.

“One through nine the last two innings it was like, ‘How do we get these guys out?’ They hit the ball hard everywhere,” Stefanilo said.

Stationed in right field after making several terrific plays to help himself on the mound, Abbott bailed out Hilton with a game-saver to end the Brewer seventh. He ranged toward center and slid on his belly to glove a flare off the bat of Yuhi Sasaki.

“I looked at (Jackson) in center and said, ‘Oh, I don’t want him to have this.’ I just hustled,” Abbott said.

Martin’s stroke in the seventh was the only base hit from the bottom third off Mt. Blue’s order. Hilton and Abbott combined for five of the Cougars’ nine hits.

“I was really pumped,” said Martin, a junior first baseman. “My teammates were yelling for me and I knew I could go up and get the job done.”

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