BRUNSWICK — The Mt. Ararat girls’ basketball team entered its game against Brunswick on Tuesday in the middle of a dream season, with wins in 14 of its 16 games.

Victory No. 15, however, may have been the biggest yet.

The Eagles got 12 points from Cali Pomerleau, 10 from Kennedy Lampert, and prevailed down the stretch of a dead-even contest to earn a 41-36 victory over neighboring rival Brunswick in a matchup of two of Class A South’s top teams.

“They’re a rival, they’re worth a lot of (Heal) points being the No. 1 seed, they were in the state championship last year,” Pomerleau said. “It was a pretty big deal to us.”

Mt. Ararat, in third place in the region entering the night, improved to 15-2 and has a final regular-season game against Deering remaining. The Dragons, who began the day in first place, head into the postseason at 16-2.

Brunswick took the teams’ first showdown, 44-38. The Eagles took lessons from that defeat.

“We did not play a complete game the last time we played them,” Mt. Ararat Coach Julie Petrie said. “We got into the fourth quarter but we didn’t play consistent enough to beat them. I thought, today, our focus going in was to have the mindset, ‘We have nothing to lose.’ ”

The game was tied seven times, the last at 30 before Avery Beal hit a 3-pointer with 33 seconds left in the third. Mt. Ararat led by one going into the fourth but was able to build on it by allowing only one Brunswick basket in the fourth.

A 3-pointer by Pomerleau gave the Eagles their largest lead at 38-33 with 5:20 to play.

“It was loud, you couldn’t hear the bench, the energy was just booming in here,” Lampert said. “It felt great.”

Brunswick’s lone basket in the fourth, a long 3-pointer by Dakota Shipley (18 points), made it 38-36 with 3:33 to play and brought the Dragons fans in the packed stands back into the game. Brunswick got a stop on the next possession, but missed both a driving layup and a put-back attempt with a chance to tie it.

Shooting woes crippled the Dragons, who missed their final seven shots after Shipley’s 3-pointer and went 1 of 4 from the foul throw line in the fourth.

“The game came down to who hit shots late. They got a big 3 late, we missed four or five layups,” Brunswick Coach Sam Farrell said. “That was a defensive battle and it sounds like a cliche, but whoever made shots in the fourth quarter was going to win the game.”

Mt. Ararat was able to neutralize Brunswick’s size inside with Beal (seven points, 13 rebounds) and Julianna Allen (six points) effectively combating the Dragons’ forward duo of Shipley and Maddy Werner.

“We know we can score,” Pomerleau said, “but not allowing them to get down there was the key for us tonight.”

And the key to earning the kind of win the Eagles believed they were capable of attaining.

“We knew that we could play with them,” Petrie said. “(It’s big) to get your kids to buy in and we tell them, ‘You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.’ It adds an extra layer of confidence when they achieve that goal.”

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