There was an air of desperation Friday when the New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva baseball team took the field against Kenyon-Wanamingo.

The Panthers (7-6, 3-4) were mired in a four-game losing streak where everything that could go wrong did go wrong at the worst possible time.

NRHEG head coach Jeff Reese came out with an aggressive approach to the game from the start after the Panthers had struggled to put together any semblance of offense in their last two games, both 3-2 losses.

NRHEG came through with an 11-10 win against the Knights in the bottom of the seventh when Payden Peterson sent a pitch up the middle to score Naysh Huntington.

“It’s just really big to get that off your shoulders,” Peterson said. “Spirits were kind of low and it’s just good to finally get back on top and hopefully we just go up from here.”

It was a much-needed victory for the Panthers who pulled out all the stops early on to find a way to score runs.

In the second inning Reese put on a suicide squeeze with runners on second and third. Both runners scored and NRHEG took a 5-0 lead.

“We like to do that if we get the right people on base,” Reese said.

But Kenyon-Wanamingo came back to a take a 6-5 lead in the top of the third.

The Panthers took advantage of four walks and two base hits to take an 8-6 lead in the bottom half.

The see-saw game continued into the fourth when the Knights (0-11) got a leadoff home run and an RBI single from Brady Afinson to tie the game at 8.

It didn’t last long because Tom Wacholz gave NRHEG a 9-8 lead with an RBI single and later scored on an error to push the game to 10-8.

The Panthers got into a jam in the sixth inning after Kenyon-Wanamingo cut the lead to 10-9 and threatened with a runner on first with two outs. That’s when Reese reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a fake overthrow to first base on a pickoff attempt to catch Dylan Seifert trying to steal second.

Even with all the extra effort it seemed like the Panthers might have been snakebitten when the Knights tied the game in the seventh on an fielding error.

With two outs and a runner on first a base hit got by NRHEG right fielder Matt Tomsche to allow the tying run to score.

But in the seventh Peterson came up with the base hit the Panthers have been craving.

“It was a thriller,” Peterson said. “These are the kind of games you want to play in.”

NRHEG 11, Kenyon-Wanamingo 10

Kenyon-Wanamingo 006 201 1 — 10 13 4

NRHEG 323 200 1 — 11 11 3

WP — Naysh Huntington 4 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 4 BB, 4 K

LP — Brady Afinson 4 IP, 4 H, 3 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 5 K