LEAVITTSBURG — The Crestview Rebels battled back time and time again, but they could never find that one extra shot to put them over the hump in their Division III sectional bracket final against the LaBrae Vikings on Friday night.

The teams split during the regular season, each winning on their Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference Gray Tier rival’s home court.

In the end, the Vikings cut the Rebels’ possessions in half in the fourth quarter which allowed them to escape with a 52-51 win.

“At that point in the game, they wanted to just slow down and play control,” Crestview coach Rick Gates said. “We wanted to play up tempo. We, from the second quarter on, tried to just rev it up a little bit and get the game going up and down. Just thinking that would be to our advantage because in the half court early, they hit good shots out of good sets to their credit.

“So we just tried to up the game that way, and they took some momentum out of us early in that fourth quarter. That hurt. At that point, everyone’s tired — they’re tired, we’re tired.”

Tre’Von Drake and Landen Kiser led the Vikings with 16 and 12 points, respectively.

Crestview had erased numerous eight-point deficits in the first half when it seemed like LaBrae was poised to break the game wide open as the Vikings held a 32-28 lead at the half.

“They started getting us with some traps out of the transition on some rebounding that we weren’t ready for in the first half,” Kiser said. “I thought in the full court we were able to spread them out and beat the press. We missed a couple easy ones in the first half.”

Both teams combined to shoot 23-of-45 in the first half, but the Vikings had the upper hand and led wire to wire.

Kirkland Miller led the Rebels with 17 points with Drake Golden adding 13.

“We just knew that it was gonna be a barnburner down the stretch here,” Gates said. “We tried to defend them a certain way early, and to their credit they hit shots. Then we had to adjust it and try and get some trapping going, just to take them out of rhythm. It was just pretty evenly matched. The difference in three games was 11 points. Just some good high school games.”

The Rebels got it within one, 44-43, heading into the final quarter.

LaBrae used its ball handlers to its advantage with screens to start the fourth.

The Vikings took advantage of the tightness that Crestview was giving them on the defensive side.

“We tried to spread them out, just to try to make them chase us around a little bit, try to create some gaps and some lanes and I thought it worked when Tre’Von got a couple of easy ones in there,” Kiser said.

Those buckets from Drake pushed the LaBrae advantage to 49-43 with 5:47 left in the game.

Golden responded with a 3 to push it back to three with 4:49 left.

Again, the Vikings ran clock with another Drake basket. Crestview cut it back down to three, 51-48, with 1:02 left after a Jack Yerkey bucket. A steal on the ensuing inbound by Golden made it 51-50 with less than 1 minute to play.

The chaos ensued with Conner Myer splitting a pair from the charity stripe and Miller doing the same on the other end, again making it a one-point game, 52-51, with 8 seconds left.

Both teams had back-to-back turnovers on the ensuing inbounds followed by a LaBrae travel.

Anthony Cusick drove down the paint with 3 seconds left on the clock and got a good look at the rim that didn’t fall for the Rebels as time expired.

“At that point in the game, we wanted to take the ball to the hole,” Gates said. “Kirkland had a good drive earlier and almost had an and one. It just rolled out. He’s our best free throw shooter. He makes one out of two you know and we were lucky enough to get another. We had a good look at it, but just didn’t finish.”

Kiser was happy with the defense as it took the ball out of Miller’s hands this time when Miller drove to basket earlier and saw Golden with the tip in.

“We got a contested shot and did a nice job of getting through the one guy to get a shot off,” he said. “We were really locking on to the Miller and were really watching Golden on a tip back. It’s usually not the shot, but usually the rebounder with the tip in. We were really coming out of the time out there and going we knew we had to make sure we tried to take those two away and make somebody else take a shot on us.”