Baseball is a game of sometimes.

Sometimes the ball lands on the foul line. Sometimes the runner is called safe.

Sometimes the fairy tale ending happens, and sometimes the dream falls short.

For Wiscasset High School baseball's unprecedented Cinderella season, baseball again showed why it is a sometimes game.

The Wolverines never trailed, and led for five-and-half innings, yet in the end it was Bangor Christian, the Class D heavyweight, that won, 5-4, in an instant classic.

For the Bangor Christian Patriots, the fairy tale ending happened: Senior Cody Collins won his third consecutive title by scoring the tying run in the bottom of the seventh and driving in the winning run in the bottom of the eighth. The Mr. Baseball finalist also happened to be the winning pitcher for a Bangor Christian team that was playing in front of a home crowd.

That's not to say the sizable Wiscasset crowd, who traveled several hours north to Bangor's Mansfield Stadium, didn't have much to cheer about during the Class D state final game.

Wiscasset jumped out to an early lead as senior Chandler Longfellow scored on a seeing-eye single from fellow senior Nate Howard in the second inning.

Longfellow knocked in catcher Grant Hefler in the next inning to give the Wolverines (10-10) a 2-0 lead.

Pitcher Daren Wood was able to corral the Patriots (19-1) for most of the game and left in the sixth inning with a 4-3 lead.

Bangor Christian showed how the team was able to win the state title in 2012 and 2013, however, as the team erased Wiscasset's lead in the seventh before loading the bases in the eighth to set up Collins's heroics.

For Wiscasset, it was the first trip to the state finals in the school's baseball history. In Head Coach Mike Bowles' first season, it was a season that had a late start:

He wasn't named the head coach until the eve of the season.

“We didn't have a lot of time to prep for the season, and I was asking them to do things they had never done before,” he said. “A lot of it was new to them.”

The team shot out of the gate, despite playing a full Class C schedule. In the middle of the season the Class D Wolverines faltered, only to have the team pick up momentum as the season drew to a close.

Some players quit, others left and Wiscasset was left with just 11 players.

“We had to patch up (the team) a little bit,” Bowles said. “But that, and the schedule we played, made the kids tougher. They had to show how much heart they had every single game.”

That toughness translated: The Wolverines went into the Western Class D playoffs as a four seed. They pounded the fifth seed (Valley High School, 10-0), slipped past the top seed (Richmond, 9-3) and blanked the reigning Western Champ (Buckfield, 4-0).

Although the state title slipped past, most of the Wiscasset squad will get another chance.

The team will lose starters and stalwarts Howard, Longfellow and Cass Carr to graduation, but will bring back the other six starters and the two remaining bench players.

As Bowles said after the game, the team has been there once, and it knows now what it takes.

“We'll do it all again next year,” he said. “We have a lot to look forward to.”

Because sometimes, as Bangor Christian just proved, teams get another chance.