STRUTHERS — Nearly two weeks before Wednesday’s Division III girls basketball district semifinal, the Crestview girls basketball team had a real shot at pulling off an upset over Liberty in a regular season All-American Conference Blue Tier contest.

That didn’t happen as the pesky Leopards squeaked out a narrow win, but the Rebels learned their lesson.

Getting contributions from all over the roster, Crestview pulled off a 69-53 win over the top-seeded Leopards to earn a spot in the district final. No. 4 seed Crestview moves to 16-8 and will meet second-seeded South Range in the district final at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Struthers Fieldhouse.

Liberty falls to 20-5, having come up one game short of returning to the district championship contest as it did a season ago.

“This is year three for me here,” Crestview coach Aaron Blatch said. “We’re pretty junior-oriented and we were 0-5 against Liberty coming in. They’ve beat us in every way imaginable. There have been a couple close calls and a couple beatdowns.

“This just meant so much to our kids. At the beginning of the year when we talked about goal-setting, one of the things that kept coming up was ‘Beat Liberty.’ ”

Junior forward Krista Perry set the workmanlike tone for the winners with 20 points, 12 rebounds and six assists. Senior Tanner Hoffer also injected a lot of energy into the lineup by tallying 13 of her 19 points in the first half. She also had 13 rebounds.

“We have a lot of great players and everyone was making their shots tonight,” Perry said. Everything was just flowing well and it ended up really great for us.”

Perry only came out of the game in the waning minutes. She expected to be tired after this one and that was the case.

“I knew Liberty being that good, I was going to do a lot of running up and down and being on the floor a lot,” Perry said.

Liberty relied mostly on the 3-ball early as all of its first quarter points were from behind the arc. A four-point second quarter by the Leopards put the Rebels in the driver’s seat.

Perhaps the biggest momentum boost of the game came when senior Madi Wick nailed a three with 25 seconds to go in the first half to make it 25-16.

Blatch said the last regular season Liberty game was the only contest all season in which Wick did not play.

“For her to come in and make the shot was great,” Blatch said. “Aside from the shot she also played really well. It kind of gave our bench a boost.”

Addison Bandy also contributed a great deal with 15 points. Mara Halas got in on the act with 10 points.

Demi Watson led the Leopards with 19 points.