SACO — The Thornton Academy boys baseball team dropped a tough 3-2 decision over the visiting Cheverus Stags on Wednesday afternoon.

In a game of inches, Cheverus managed to break the tie in the top of the sixth on an RBI single by Dominic Casale to push the Stags ahead for good.

Cheverus starting pitcher Jared Brooks had a strong outing for the Stags, picking up the complete game win while striking out 11, and allowing just two hits and two walks.

Brogan Searle-Belanger took the hill for the Trojans and also has a solid showing, pitching seven innings while collecting six strikeouts. Searle-Belanger took the loss while allowing seven hits.

TA coach Greg Paradis was impressed with both pitchers after the loss.

“(Brooks) was efficient early on — we got to him a little bit toward the tail end and made him exert more energy with his pitches. He got ahead of us, he threw strikes early, his fastball kept us off balance,” said Paradis. “I thought our guy matched him, he had a little bit of trouble in the first inning but that was by design. You saw that he settled down later on and I think they both pitched very well. I think defensively if tightened things up a little bit things could have been different.”

Trailing 2-0 in the bottom of the fifth, the Trojans managed to tie the score off a two-run single by Luke Chessie that sent Jacob Laplume and Tim Smith across the plate. However, the Stags managed to get the go-ahead run the following half inning.

Cheverus jumped out to a quick 1-0 lead in the top half of the first when Jack Casale reached home on a throwing error. Brooks would later help his own cause by knocking in Griffin Watson on a groundout in the fifth to give the Stags the 2-0 advantage.

Although Paradis was pleased with his team’s fight, he hopes to see the Trojans learn to pull ahead in close games.

“We got beat by a better team today. We want to do some of the things that they do, hit and get runners in scoring position,” said Paradis. “We lost three games by one run, that’s hard to take because there are important times in the ball game when we have runners on but we aren’t getting the big hits. We have guys in the lineup that can consistently hit but we need other guys to pick it up.”

The Trojans fall to 2-3 this season, but remain confident as the spring progresses.

“What I know is that so far we can play with anyone. There’s no one that is dramatically better than us,” said Paradis. “Cheverus was better than us today and we tip our cap to them, but there is no one that we’ve played so far that I don’t think we can beat.”

— Associate Sports Editor Alex Sponseller can be reached at [email protected] or at 282-1535 ext. 323. Follow the Journal Tribune Sports Department on Twitter @JournalTsports.