Ultimately, the Radford baseball team came up just short Wednesday afternoon.

The Rams, who finished sixth in the Oahu Interscholastic Association Division I West this season after a promotion from D2, saw a two-run lead collapse when host Moanalua scored three runs in the bottom of the seventh to walk off with a 5-4 win in a first-round OIA tournament game.

The loss meant the end of the season for Radford, which completed the year with a 3-10 record, but it certainly earned the respect of its opposition Wednesday.

"They deserved to be here," Moanalua first baseman Kenji Yamaguchi said of the Rams. "It was a dogfight today. They put the ball in play, put pressure on us, so we just had to come through and make routine plays."

Radford held the lead for most of the game after clean-up hitter Jacob Gonzalez hammered a 1-0 pitch for a two-out, three-run home run in the top of the third inning and were three outs from eliminating Na Menehune.

"Radford brought their ‘A' game," Moanalua coach Scott Yamada said. "They're scrappy, a well-coached team, they put the ball in play, they were tough outs. Hats off to them, we just came out on the good side this time."

Starting pitcher Landyn Bartness was tough on the mound, allowed just two runs on two hits in his 3 2/3 innings of work before giving way for the final 2 1/3 innings to Nick Martinez, who got out of a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the sixth.

"We may not be the most talented team on paper, but we've got a hard-working group of kids and they come out here, do their jobs, do what we ask them to do and the bottom line is this was a good year for us to show that with what we've got, we can definitely handle our own in D1," Rams' fifth-year coach Jacob Sur said.

Radford finished second in the OIA White last year, falling in the league title game to Waianae, and qualified for the D2 state tournament. This year, it swept the season series from Waianae and took a game off Leilehua early in the regular season and qualified for the postseason.

Sur is hoping Wednesday's experience will pay off in the long run for his young team.

"We've got a good group, but it all depends because we're so heavily dependent on the military, so we'll what happens next year, but we've got a good strong middle coming back, so we should be decent," Sur said.