DuBOIS — A lot of the numbers weren’t pretty when it comes to judging well-played baseball games. Most importantly, it’s all about scoring more runs and advancing when it’s playoff time.

For the Brookville Raiders baseball team Monday night, its 13-9 slugfest win over A-C Valley/Union at Stern Field that took 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete had plenty of negatives, but just enough positives to advance to Wednesday’s District 9 Class 3A Championship game against Karns City.

Down 4-0 before they batted, the Raiders went on to bang out 13 hits off three Falcon Knights pitchers and got three key innings of scoreless relief from freshman left-hander Joel Burton as they’ll take an 11-6 record into their game against the Gremlins, who advanced with an 8-3 win over St. Marys in the first game at Stern.

Wednesday’s final is at Showers Field at 4 p.m. The Raiders beat the Gremlins 4-2 in Butler back on April 21.

“Karns City is well coached, they’re fundamentally sound, they’ve got three or four arms and they got everybody available to them as well,” said Raiders head coach Chad Weaver, who must have sighed with plenty of relief after getting the final out against the Falcon Knights with the potential tying run at the plate with the bases loaded in the seventh. “It’s going to be a fun one and if we try to play the same way tonight that we do Wednesday, we can leave the bus running because it won’t be a long night.”

The Raiders won despite their five pitchers walking 12, hitting two batters and striking out 10 as they combined to throw 190 pitches. Starter Parker Kalgren was pulled after one inning after the Falcon Knights batted around and scored four despite just two hits in the inning.

Enter Burton, who allowed just one hit and two walks while hitting a batter and striking out three. He wound up getting the win.

“It’s hard for me to refer to him as a freshman because he doesn’t have that vibe to him,” Weaver said. “The stage isn’t too big for him. He just doesn’t blink and when he gets on the mound, he throws strikes. He’s a competitor and he wants the baseball.”

Burton’s relief effort gave the Raiders’ offense a chance to catch its breath. They scored two in the second, six in the third, three in the fourth and two more in the fifth and never trailed after the six-run third.

“We had a lot of good at-bats,” Weaver said. “We didn’t get off to a good start and teams in the past would have laid down and this team has proven throughout this entire season that they just don’t wave the flag and that’s what I love about them. They are grinder, one through nine, and every night it’s somebody else who kind of starts the rally and tonight it was all over the place. We had a bunch of guys contribute on the mound.”

The Falcon Knights committed eight errors and with the Raiders hitting — eight of nine starters had at least one hit and four had two or more — the momentum swung heavily the Raiders’ way after Burton came in to quiet the Falcon Knights.

Zach Phillips and Trenton Colgan singled in runs in the second inning. The Raiders sent 11 batters to the plate in the third, taking advantage of three ACV/Union errors, and plated six runs to take the lea for good. Burton singled in a run and bases-loaded walks to Phillips and Colgan pushed home runs. Dante Morey singled in the sixth run of the inning.

Then in the fourth, Kalgren doubled in courtesy runner Gavin Mills and came around on Colgan’s ground-run double down the left-field line. Colgan advanced to third on a wild pitch and scored on a catcher throwing error to put the Raiders up 11-4.

After the Falcon Knights scored a run in the fifth — Burton walked leadoff batter Connor Langdon before being relieved by Chase Nimmo — the Raiders put up their final two runs on the bottom of the inning on RBI singles from Landen Marrara and Ladd Blake to make it 13-5.

Weaver tried to patchwork his bullpen the rest of the way to keep some arms eligible for Wednesday — all five pitchers are eligible — as Nimmo pitched into the sixth before Landen Marrara finished the inning. Then it was Blake finishing the game in the seventh.

The Falcon Knights scored three runs in the sixth, the big play in the inning coming when Lexan Alworth lifted a two-out fly ball to center, but Colgan lost the ball in the sky and it fell for a two-run double. Colbin Elliott singled in another run to cut it to 13-8.

In the seventh with a runner on base after an infield throwing error and two outs, the Falcon Knights managed to load the bases with a single and two walks before Blake got Elliott to chase a 2-2 fastball out of the zone to end the game.

Feeling like they were going to score enough runs, Weaver went with the aggressive bullpen approach to keep arms eligible for Karns City. It worked, just enough, in what turned out to be a very sloppily played game by both sides.

“We just felt that we were going to continue to score,” Weaver said. “We were seeing it well, and we were hitting the baseball. We made some really bad decisions early. We had a miscommunication early that took us out of an inning. We just didn’t really fundamentally perform our highest IQ baseball tonight, but kudos to ACV/Union, because this game, after surrounding a 4-0 lead and all momentum was in their favor. They had every right with how young they are to shut it down, and they didn’t. They brought the tying run to the plate in the seventh.”

The Falcon Knights finished 8-9.

“They hit the ball a ton tonight, maybe one or two strikeouts so give them a lot of credit there,” ACV/Union head coach Logan Pistorious said. “We got off to the to the hot start and weren’t able to sustain that. Burton, the lefty, came in and shut us down. That flipped the momentum their way.”