With the St. Bede softball team’s season on the line trailing by one with two outs in the bottom of the sixth inning, No. 3 hitter Ava Balestri had three runners on the basepath in front of her, two strikes against her, one song on her lips and, she said with a relieved smile, zero stress.

“Honestly, going into that at-bat I knew I had to flush everything that happened prior,” said Balestri, who was 0 for 2 and in an 0-2 count when she tagged a line-drive, three-run triple down the left-field line to score the tying, go-ahead and insurance run in St. Bede’s 5-3 victory over the host Hawks in Saturday’s championship game of the Class 2A Prairie Central Regional.

“I had to go in with the most positive thoughts I could. I always sing a song in the [batter’s] box, so I was signing my song – ‘Mr. Brightside’ by the Killers – and then I got down 0-2 in the count, but I didn’t let that affect me. I’ve been in pressure situations before, and I just took everything in, let the game come to me, and that was the outcome.

“I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

Neither could the Bruins, who with their fifth consecutive regional championship move on to Tuesday’s semifinal of the 2A Pontiac Sectional. St. Bede (30-4) will face Seneca (35-2), which defeated the Bedans twice during the regular season.

“You know, we’re just going to play our game,” St. Bede coach Rob Ruppert said of facing their conference champion a third time. “Obviously, we’re going to make some adjustments. They’re a really good ballclub too. We’ve got our work cut out for us, but we’re going to take the challenge on.”

Prairie Central (15-13) – which led 3-0 through two innings thanks to a Sam Slagel two-run homer in the first and some small ball from the bottom of the order in the second, but saw St. Bede chip its way back into the game with a run in the third, another in the fourth and then Balestri’s laser over the glove of leaping third baseman Jules Woodrey – sees its season come to an end.

“We’ve got a lot of good senior leadership here,” Prairie Central coach Josh Creek said, “but we knew [St. Bede was] going to be a formidable opponent. ... We were able to get on them early and I thought our top [of the order] would continue to hit throughout the game, but we just came up short.”

St. Bede right-handed pitcher Macy Strauch did a fantastic job settling in after the rough start. After allowing three runs over the opening two innings, she allowed no more, pitching her way out of jams in the fourth and sixth, then working a 1-2-3 top of the seventh after Balestri’s blast gave the top-seeded Bruins their first lead of the day.

Strauch finished with a line of seven innings pitched and three earned runs allowed on six hits and one walk with eight strikeouts.

Strauch’s counterpart, Prairie Central’s Faith Fields (6 IP, 4 ER, 6 H, 4 BB, 8 K) pitched well too, but after playing escape artist with runners in scoring position the first two innings did not come away unscathed in a third that started with a Leah Griggs infield single and culminated in Hannah Heiberger’s lost-in-the-sun RBI triple to right.

St. Bede struck again the next inning. A Sadie Leffelman leadoff walk started the home half of the fourth, a catcher’s interference call on what would have been a Griggs single anyway put two on, and Heiberger struck again with an RBI single to make it 3-2.

Strauch pitched around a leadoff double in the top of the sixth, and Morgan Mercer with a single, Griggs drawing a walk and Emma Slingsby with a spinning-top bunt single that came to rest just inside the first-base line loaded the bases for Balestri’s game-changing double.

“We got down early,” Ruppert said, “but that’s happened to us before this year, and we never give up, we never give in. We stay focused, and we stay in the game.”

Heiberger with two hits and two RBIs and Griggs with one hit and two runs scored led the St. Bede offense outside of Balestri.

Prairie Central’s Slagel finished with a double, a home run and two of the Hawks’ three runs batted in.