STANDISH — Pretty? No. Opportunistic? Absolutely.

Buckfield beat Valley for the Western D baseball championship Thursday in a 9-6 game that featured 19 walks, five errors, two hit batters and a grand total of five hits.

To the top-seeded Bucks, who have been thirsting 15 years for a regional title, it was more about turning points than style points.

“It feels amazing. It couldn’t get any better,” senior center fielder Trevor Averill said. “This has been our goal since the first practice.”

The other goal has been the first state title in school history, for which Buckfield (17-1) will meet Eastern Maine champion Bangor Christian at 3 p.m. on Saturday at Mansfield Stadium in Bangor.

The Bucks rallied to tie the game after giving up two runs in the top of the first, broke the game open with a six-run third, then held off third-seeded Valley after reliever Cody White found his groove.

White relieved starter Jonah Williams with the bases loaded and one out in the fifth inning and proceeded to walk three of the next four batters as Valley closed to within 8-6. But he struck out Carrington Miller to end that threat and finished the Cavaliers off by retiring seven of the last eight.

“It took me a while to get used to the mound. I struggled to find a rhythm at first,” White said.

The starters for both teams had the same difficulty. Williams walked four in the first inning. Add in a balk and an error and the Cavaliers (9-7) were able to take a 2-0 lead without a hit.

Valley starter Caleb Wade started the bottom of the first off by throwing eight consecutive balls to Averill and Owen Bennett. After a Williams ground out to first moved both runners up, senior catcher Alan LeBel laced a double to left to tie the game.

“It’s a tough situation when a pitcher hasn’t thrown many strikes. But you get an opportunity with a nice strike down the middle and you can’t really let it go by,” LeBel said. “I just made contact with it, wasn’t trying to crush it. Getting those runs helped us gather ourselves.”

LeBel had two of the Bucks’ three hits and drove in three runs.

“That’s a little different,” LeBel said of the team’s three-hit total. “A lot of teams that we play come out and say, ‘Wow, you guys can really hit the ball.’ A walks a walk. We’ll take it if we need it.”

The Bucks ended up taking eight walks. Five of those came in the six-run third.

“We were pretty patient. We waited for the good pitches to come and swung at the good ones when they came,” Averill said.

Dalton Hart and Garrett Hamann walked with the bases loaded and LeBel and White each added RBI singles to chase Wade.

“He hasn’t pitched in 15 days,” Valley coach Paul Belanger said of Wade. “He found (his control) and then he lost it again in the third.”

Two more runs came across against reliever Carrington Miller when Hamann beat a force attempt at second base on Averill’s grounder to short. A hustling White scored all the way from second on the play to make it 8-2.

Williams, a sophomore southpaw, followed his shaky first with a 1-2-3 second. He worked around two walks in the third and a single, hit batter and error in the fourth.

With his pitch count mounting, Williams tired in the fifth, surrendering a run on two walks, a hit batter and an error before giving way to White.

“Williams had a tough outing early in the year where he’d given up a lot of walks, but both he and White have pitched a lot of clean innings this season. For whatever reason, they didn’t have that at the beginning,” Buckfield coach Joe McLaughlin said. “I wanted to go with Jonah as long as he could go. As soon as I saw that he was running out of gas… I was hoping I could at least get four from him, and he gave me just about that.”

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