STANDISH — Sacopee Valley won more than its first Class C West baseball championship in 21 years this spring.

It claimed the Mountain Valley Conference Invitational. And don’t you dare think the Hawks aren’t finding that part of the equation just as satisfying.

“I feel like they were overlooking us,” senior pitcher Anthony Haskell said, “and we came out and showed them what Sacopee can do.”

Sacopee Valley punctuated its run through the regional Tuesday afternoon with a 4-2 victory over St. Dom’s at Mahaney Diamond. The undefeated Hawks (19-0) scored one run in the top of the sixth inning and three in the seventh to deny the Saints their seventh title in 11 years.

It continued a couple of jaw-dropping trends. No. 4 Sacopee took out three consecutive MVC teams — No. 5 Lisbon, No. 1 Monmouth and No. 3 St. Dom’s — in a year when that league appeared to pack a solid, top-to-bottom wallop.

Tuesday also represented back-to-back unlikely comebacks. Sacopee trailed Monmouth 6-2 with only three outs remaining in Saturday’s semifinal before rallying to an 8-6 triumph.

Did the Hawks feel disrespected in their quest to crash this little party?

“Absolutely without a doubt,” Sacopee coach Eric Anderson said. “I’m certainly not into the age of the Twitter and stuff, but the boys are watching what’s getting said up in the Mountain Valley Conference. There wasn’t a lot of respect. I kind of tried to use that as a little bit of motivation.”

There was both regional bias and, yes, a little common sense involved in that perceived dismissal.

Nestled in South Hiram, tucked away in the corner of a village between Fryeburg and Gorham, Sacopee doesn’t make many media waves.

The Hawks also played a hodgepodge of Class B, C and D opponents from the Western Maine Conference, and it did few favors for their tournament index in the Heal Point standings. Despite its undefeated mark, Sacopee entered the playoffs ranked behind three-loss Dirigo and four-loss St. Dom’s.

Add the fact that Dirigo was two-time defending regional champion, that St. Dom’s is a perennial visitor to this game (11 out of 12 years), and that no WMC team has won Class C West since the Saints were a member of that conference, and it’s easier to comprehend conventional wisdom.

Unless you were wearing blue, that is.

“I felt like no one believed in us. I felt like we were the underdogs the whole way,” Haskell said. “I knew we could do this. I know we can win the one next weekend.”

Haskell, a right-hander and one of only three seniors on the roster, kept Sacopee in it by escaping a first-inning jam, frequently stranding runners at third base and painting the corners for third strikes all day.

He allowed only four hits — including two infield singles by Ray Mosca — while striking out seven and walking five.

Three of those free passes came in the first inning, when Haskell gave up both St. Dom’s runs but struck out Ryan Harvey and Dillon Pratt to leave two Saints in scoring position.

“Right off the bat, that first inning, to come out of there with just the two, we really should have put up a bigger number there,” St. Dom’s coach Bob Blackman said. “We did everything right. We put a guy on third base in two or three innings, and we couldn’t square it up. It’s too bad. Guys just weren’t aggressive enough. They let the umpire get the best of them.”

Other than Brady Anderson’s one-out triple in the sixth — he later scored on Roderick Maynard’s infield single — the Saints were undone by bloops and bleeders.

Sacopee scored its tying run with the help of a throwing error and a dropped fly ball. Mike Pingree drive in the go-ahead tally with a flare between shortstop and center field for a double.

The Hawks have a season’s worth of reasons to believe those balls will drop in, even if some of that season unfolded in anonymity.

“The boys have battled back in the seventh inning and we’ve won three or four games this way,” Coach Anderson said. “A lot of times I question if they’re really intense, but I think they’re used to getting to beat down at practice, and to them this is nothing. They come back. The whole team contributes. It’s a fun team to coach.”

Mitch Lorenz carried a no-hitter into the fifth inning for the Saints. He breezed through a five-pitch inning in the second and six-pitch fourth frame.

For so long it looked like the Saints day. So long. So close. So heartbreaking.

“Now I know how Monmouth feels,” Blackman said. “You knew there was going to be a run. When momentum changes, it changes, and it fell apart at that time. There’s nothing you can do about those breaks.”

Except go on creating them one more day, if you’re the Hawks.

“These kids here we started with when they were about eight years old. We’ve really, really worked hard with winter ball, rec ball in the summer and AAU. This sophomore class especially, they’ve played a lot of baseball. It’s been coming. It’s not something we did this year. It’s been in the works,” Anderson said. “We feel kind of validated. We’ve kind of taken down all the big teams. Hopefully we get a little respect now.”

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