MONMOUTH — The Lisbon baseball team had to watch as the Monmouth players celebrated winning the Class C South championship last year.

Friday was the Greyhounds’ first chance to enact a bit of payback. And they didn’t miss it.

Hunter Brissette pitched seven strong innings and scored two runs, Levi Tibbetts drove in three runs, and Lisbon won a battle of unbeatens and C South favorites, 5-4.

“They’re a great team. I was expecting a really close game no matter what, I knew they were going to fight all the way through,” said Brissette, who struck out seven and allowed eight hits. “They’re a great hitting team one through nine. I just tried to show my best today.”

Lisbon (5-0) hasn’t lost since falling to Monmouth 5-0 in the regional final last year.

“It feels a little bit like a sense of revenge there,” Brissette said. “It’s nice to win that game.”

“Definitely. One 100%,” Tibbetts answered when asked if last year was on his mind. “We all talk about it, we go to the gym and we talk about it, we never want to feel like we did last year.”

Monmouth (5-1) didn’t suffer its first defeat easily. The Mustangs trailed  5-2 going into the seventh, but got the tying run on second before Brissette sealed the victory.

“This is about what we expected,” Monmouth coach Eric Palleschi said. “We and Lisbon know each other pretty well. It was good baseball. We each made a few mistakes, they were able to capitalize on our mistakes more than we were on theirs, and they ended up on top.”

The teams exchanged two-run singles in the third, with Tibbetts knocking in Aiden Parker and Brissette and Matt Marquis driving in Hunter Frost and Hayden Fletcher. Brissette singled in his next at-bat in the fifth and stole second. Tibbetts then drilled a ball to deep right that went for a ground-rule double and a 3-2 Lisbon lead.

“I saw the curve pretty well out of his hand, a little bit outside, so I tried to put it to right field as hard as I could,” Tibbetts said. “I just got it off the barrel good.”

Mason Booker scored a run in the sixth and Brissette added another on a Caleb Phillips groundout in the seventh, but Monmouth wasn’t finished. Seth McKenney led off the bottom of the seventh with a single, before Fletcher got on with an infield hit. After a groundout, an error at third on a grounder by Isaac Oliveira scored McKenney and put two runners on. Fletcher then scored on a groundout, putting Oliveira at second with two outs.

Brissette was at 102 pitches, and coach Randy Ridley went out for a chat but kept his senior on the mound to face Owen Harding, who had already doubled off of him.

“We were talking about situations, about maybe walking the kid and going after Frost,” Ridley said. “Sometimes you’ve got to have 100% faith in what your pitcher feels comfortable doing, and Hunter said ‘No, I want to go after him.’ ‘OK, let’s do it.'”

Brissette backed his coach’s faith, getting a strikeout to end the game and punctuating it with a fist pump.

“You’ve just got to put those (plays) past you,” Brissette said. “You only do what you can control.”

Lisbon had its payback, though Ridley said he was thinking more about how his team was going to pass its first major test of the season than settling a year-old score.

“Our games over the past few years have always been like this. Tight, nip-and-tuck,” he said. “To play them this early in the season is huge, and to come out with a win is even bigger.”

Monmouth was threatening to take its first lead of the game in the bottom of the fourth when Harding doubled with two outs, but umpires called the next batter out due to the Mustangs hitting out of order.

“It was (tough), giving up outs like that kind of hurts,” said Palleschi, whose team got six innings on the mound from Sam Calder. “But the kids didn’t let it bother them, didn’t let it affect them. We just kept going.”

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