Staff photo / Preston Byers. Liberty’s Chloe Fleps celebrates after the final out of Wednesday’s playoff game vs. Cardinal Mooney at Center Park in Liberty.

LIBERTY — Liberty came away with timely hits and relied on steady pitching to eliminate Cardinal Mooney from the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) softball playoffs and advance to the Division V, Northeast 3 district semifinal.

The 19th-seeded Leopards decisively defeated No. 21 Cardinals 6-1 on Wednesday at Center Park in Liberty to earn a sectional final win and extend their postseason run.

“Played well, did really well defensively,” Liberty coach Brett Fine said of his team. “The pitching from Chloe Fleps, unbelievable. She did well. Had some situations where I thought we could have scored some more runs and didn’t get the runs in. But overall, it was a good game.”

After a scoreless first inning, Liberty opened the scoring with a two-run double that snuck under the glove of Mooney’s third baseman.

The Leopards seemingly doubled their advantage in the following inning, but after protesting from Mooney’s dugout and minutes-long conversations with each other and Fine, the game’s umpires ruled that a Liberty runner interfered with Mooney’s shortstop and prevented her from fielding a ball when they nearly collided on the basepaths. The decision took two runs off the board for Liberty and ended the inning.

“They said my runner interfered with the shortstop, and personally, I didn’t think that she did,” Fine said. “She was behind the shortstop, so the shortstop has the means to go get the ball, so my runner shouldn’t have to get out of her way to go get the ball. If she was behind her and she hesitated, if the girl ran inward, then that’s interference. By them overruling that and saying that was interference — I don’t know. But it’s a bang, bang call.”

Fortunately for the Leopards, the removed runs did not factor into the outcome. Instead, after the rain that arrived in the third inning subsided, Liberty improved its lead to five runs in the bottom of the fifth.

While the Cardinals finally scored a run against Fleps in the sixth inning, Mooney could not come up with the hits it truly needed to stay alive in the playoffs.

“They hit when the running third runners were in scoring position, and we didn’t,” Mooney head coach Rich Stickel said. “We had many opportunities to do that, and we just couldn’t get that going. And they did. They were the better team today. Our players played well. They played the best they could. Still proud of them.

“I told them [to] hold their heads up high. The season’s over, but there’s always next year.”

The majority of Mooney’s roster is set to return, and Stickel recently said the Cardinals were starting freshmen at three of the most important positions: catcher, shortstop and third base. He hopes that the experience of this season and a game like Wednesday’s will prove invaluable moving forward.

As for Liberty, its reward for beating Mooney is a third meeting with top-seeded Champion. The Golden Flashes, who won each of their 14 games in the Mahoning Valley Conference this season, defeated Liberty 16-0 and 12-0 in a doubleheader on April 28.

“We’ve had some close games in our conference, with LaBrae, Crestview and also Southeast last week,” Fine said. “If the kids play to their potential, they can stay in a game with Champion. If they don’t give up extra outs, they can be competitive. It’s like anything — we played them before, and they 10-runned us in those two games. But the one game, it should have been 2-0 in the bottom of the second inning. And it was 8-0. We can’t do that.”

The Leopards and Flashes are scheduled to play their district semifinal game at Roger Samuelson Field on Monday at 5 p.m. In the meantime, Liberty will host its senior night game vs. Girard on Friday at Center Park.