BROOKFIELD ­– Neither Warren John F. Kennedy or Heartland Christian came into Tuesday’s Division IV Sectional Semifinal on the best circumstances.

The Lions had lost three straight. The Eagles meanwhile had dropped six of their last seven.

Something had to give Tuesday, and it happened in the eventual fourth set that seemed to be going the way of Kennedy before Heartland Christian held serve to sneak by the Eagles in four sets, 25-19, 16-25, 25-15, and 25-22.

“In my opinion, Heartland Christian, they always have a solid program,” Kennedy coach Sam Young said. “They’re coached very well. I respect their coach. She (Maggie Martin) does a great job with those kids. We play a lot of high caliber teams. In my opinion, it was more like what we didn’t do versus anything else.

“We just made simple mistakes that just kept piling up and we just unfortunately let it get away from us. The last couple games of the season just haven’t gone our way, but I’m very proud of the way our girls played. They played hard and at the end. At the end of the day, that’s all I can ask for.”

That they did in that fourth set where they held a 15-9 advantage as it felt like this matchup was headed to an inevitable fifth set.

Then, Jordan Webb’s serving erased the deficit at hand and turned it into a mental challenge against the Eagles (9-12).

It’s what Martin reminds her team of constantly as volleyball can become a game of streaks that you have to overcome.

“I’m a big mental coach,” she said. “We talk about mental things constantly. I’m always telling them ‘Ladies it’s 0-0 right now. We’re starting over. You got to clear your heads. We’ve got to refocus and we’ve got to get in there and do the little things.’ I think they did because they were able to come back from that deficit but it’s 70-percent mental and 30-percent physical.

“I always tell them. We do a lot. I always like to talk, make sure we’re calling out where the set is. It’s going to get your mind off of that bad thing that happened. It’s going to move you on to the next point so call where the set is. Talk about who has seams. They started doing that more and more, and then we were able to get out of that deficit. Mentality is huge. That’s what I try to really push with.”

Heartland Christian was already dealing with a lot of injuries. And had to try different things with their rotations.

“I’m proud of how the girls handled that,” Martin said. “They were really put into positions that literally I had to do today. So I am proud of how they handled that. You could tell it frazzled us here and there. Emma Hall, she’s one of our star players and she’s hurt right now.

“I think overall they still came together and they played well. We have a young team. So errors are a big thing for us. We really try to focus on minimizing our errors.”

After Lauren Miasek’s serving gave the Lions (8-11) a 22-20 lead and essentially their first lead since the open point of the set, it came down to who would make the least mistakes and play as close to perfect.

Webb led the Lions with 12 serve points while Miasek added 10.

Miasek also had 14 kills.

“I thought at times our hitting at the net was 50/50,” Young said. “We would be aggressive, then not. That gave them a lot of opportunities on offense to set things up pretty easy for their hitters. A lot of times too, we just didn’t do small things like communicating with our teammates.

“We just didn’t simply move our feet to the right spots. It’s all the little simple stuff that we let get in our way. We just didn’t didn’t play to our full potential tonight.”