Sometimes, less actually is more. Simple is better.

Kind of like Matt Wieand's postgame assessment of Friday night's Lancaster-Lebanon League Section Three girls' basketball clash between Lampeter-Strasburg and Northern Lebanon.

"That was a game of mistakes," the Pioneers coach said afterward. "But I was proud of our girls because they kept fighting and, in the end, we made just enough plays to pull it out."

That just about covers it.

Shooting 9 for 10 from the free throw line down the stretch to pull away for good, L-S kept its section title and L-L playoff hopes alive with a 46-38 overtime victory in Lampeter.

The win puts the Pioneers (9-5 L-L, 13-6 overall) in a tie for second place with the Vikings (9-5, 13-7) in Section Three with two regular-season games remaining.

Both are a game behind Manheim Central, which will host L-S in its regular-season finale next Wednesday.

The top two teams in the section earn L-L playoff berths.

"I think we're playing our best at the right time," said Wieand, whose team won its fifth straight game Friday. "We were so far back (in the standings) at one point that we didn't even talk about (winning) the section (title) this year."

But as it approached, the Pioneers couldn't help but sense the magnitude of Friday's clash.

"We kind of talked about it (before the game)," said L-S sophomore forward Bailey Corbin, who finished with a team-high 10 points and a game-high 11 rebounds. "But we all decided we just had to play as a team and, whatever the outcome was, we'd be OK in the end."

And in the end, L-S was OK, but not before surviving a sloppy affair that included a combined 46 turnovers (25 for NL, 21 for L-S), and a dismal first half in which the two teams shot a combined 9 for 44 from the field en route to a 12-12 tie at halftime.

But after the Vikings' Kelsey Battistelli hit a free throw to tie the game at 33 with 16.1 seconds left in regulation, and Corbin and Lexie Lantz missed on close looks in the final seconds to send the game to overtime, none of that mattered.

"We were ready to go," Corbin said. "It's a whole new game (at that point)."

One that L-S seized control of by scoring more points (13) in four minutes of OT than it had in the first two quarters combined — with nine of them coming from the foul line.

After Bella Miranda followed a Taylor Lininger miss to give the Pioneers a 39-36 lead with 1:30 remaining in the extra session, the Vikings turned it over on their ensuing possession and suddenly were forced to foul.

To no avail.

Sent to the line with 1:07 left, Robyn Beddow made a pair of free throws to put L-S in front 41-36.

After an empty Northern Lebanon trip, the Vikings fouled Miranda, who made two more freebies to make it 43-36 with 48.4 seconds remaining.

And when Northern Lebanon's leading scorer Emily Brandt (game-high 18 points) turned it over with 35 ticks to go, the Vikings sent Beddow back to the line.

Again, Beddow — who scored all eight of her points at the foul line on perfect shooting — made both, giving the Pioneers a 45-36 edge with 25.6 seconds left to play.

And that was pretty much that for the Vikings, who had gone to overtime for the second time this week — the first being a 38-34 victory over section leader Manheim Central Tuesday in Fredericksburg.

Not that Northern Lebanon coach Ken Battistelli was about to make excuses.

"We blew tons of opportunities and it wasn't for a lack of effort, we just weren't mentally prepared to play tonight," he said. "We played hard enough to get it done, but we didn't play well enough to get it done."

In the end, L-S did.

Even if it wasn't exactly pretty.

jfulginiti@lnpnews.com