AUBURN — Dirigo and St. Dom’s can be penciled in as candidates to play in Class C regional and state championship baseball games every spring.

You don’t need a pencil, however, to count the number of times the Cougars and Saints have taken swings outside a gymnasium, or thrown pitches off a real mound, or fielded caroms off still-thawing turf this spring. Fingers will suffice.

Both extremes were on display Monday afternoon in an entertaining Mountain Valley Conference opener, one the Saints survived for a 4-3 win over the two-time defending state champion Cougars.

Dirigo rallied for two runs in the top of the seventh against St. Dom’s left-handed reliever Mitch Lorenz, who rebounded and struck out Nick St. Germain and Gavin Hebert to leave the bases loaded.

“I wasn’t hitting my spots like I should have been and they were hitting it,” Lorenz said, “so I started with the off-speed and they were missing.”

After leaving the bases jammed themselves in each of the first two frames with only a single run to show for it, the Saints scored three in unconventional fashion to weave a 4-1 lead in the bottom of the third.

Andrew Marcous, Ray Mosca and Ryan Harvey led off with consecutive singles. Mosca’s was a sacrifice bunt that turned into a base hit when nobody from Dirigo covered first.

“A lot of our errors were mental errors,” Dirigo coach Ryan Palmer said. “I’m just speculating on what I saw, but I believe we gave up four unearned runs. We weren’t prepared, and that’s my fault.”

Harvey’s hit also was a bunt single, and Marcous raced home when the late throw to first sailed into right field.

Mosca scored when Dirigo pitcher Kaine Hutchins was called for a balk after an attempted pitch slipped out of his hand. Designated hitter Dillon Pratt, lurking eighth in the Saints’ lineup, plated Harvey with a sacrifice fly to center.

“We’ve been in the (batting) cage a lot,” winning pitcher and cleanup hitter Mike Bryant said. “A lot of kids came up big when I wasn’t hitting today and when (Lorenz) wasn’t hitting.”

The top of the order produced a run in the bottom of the first. Caleb Dostie legged out an infield single, advanced to second on a balk and scored when Mike Richard’s ground ball coaxed a throwing error.

Dirigo had runners in scoring position every inning against Bryant, who threw 88 pitches before yielding a three-run lead to Lorenz in the seventh.

Anthony Todd (3-for-3 with a walk) singled and later scored on a double by Brian Volkernick to tie it in the second.

“He was around the plate more than he wasn’t,” St. Dom’s coach Bob Blackman said of Bryant. “He had one little stretch (in the second inning) where he might have lost command a little bit.”

Dirigo’s next golden opportunity to get one back fizzled when Mosca fired a strike to Justin Keaney at the plate, preventing Tyler Frost from scoring on Hutchins’ single to end the fifth.

Bryant escaped the sixth by cradling two pop-ups back to the mound.

Lorenz chalked up the first out of the seventh before Mitch Kubesh reached on an infield single. Frost walked, and Jack Brown’s headfirst slide punctuated another base hit to load the bases.

“People who scout Dirigo know we’re a team that’s never going to give up, no matter what the score is,” Palmer said. “We proved that last year and we proved it again today. We just came up a little short, that’s all.”

Hutchins’ two-run single trimmed the deficit to one. Todd then laced the Cougars’ 10th hit of the day up the middle. After lengthy consideration, third base coach Dave Berry put up the stop sign for pinch runner Barry Campbell.

That left Dirigo with two chances to earn the final 90 feet, but Lorenz froze St. Germain with a curve on the outside corner and retired Hebert swinging.

“We didn’t help (Lorenz) out in that inning. One more play and maybe you don’t see quite as many of those hits as they did,” Blackman said. “He got those last two guys on a steady diet of curve balls, so that was OK. It’s good to get one under our belt and to beat the defending state champs. The good thing is, we respect one another, and we know it’s going to be a good game.”

The Cougars left 11 on base. Hutchins and Gavin Arsenault combined to allow six hits and struck out six.

Palmer was content to put the game into historical perspective for Dirigo.

“If there is one positive to this, we lost the first game of the year to St. Dom’s two years ago and ended up winning 19 straight,” he said. “That would be kind of cool, wouldn’t it?”

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