MISQUAH — Pike won at Braham 3–1 Thursday and lost at Pine City 3–2 Monday night, and Leah Peltola’s assessment of the two matches was nearly identical, which she says is the problem.

“We are good at long points,” she said. “We dig things we have no business digging and the other side gets tired and we win rallies we should lose. Then it is 22–20 and we have to be the team that ends it, and we are not that team yet. We got there Thursday. We did not Monday.”

Thursday at Braham went 25–19, 21–25, 25–18, 25–22, and Pike closed the fourth from behind, which Peltola called the best fifteen minutes the program has played in two years.

Monday at Pine City went the distance and the fifth set went to 17–15 after Pike led it 12–9. Three service errors in the last eight points, which the coach declined to discuss beyond confirming that there were three.

Twenty-two are out across two levels. The junior varsity is 2–1 and, by the varsity coach’s own volunteered account, is presently more consistent at serving than the team above it, a sentence she asked to have printed on the grounds that her varsity reads this newspaper.

Sandstone comes to Pike tonight, 5:30 and 7. Then Hinckley there on the twenty-second and Cambridge home on the twenty-ninth.

Peltola is in her second year and inherited a program that won nine matches in two seasons. Pike is 3–2 and has already extended three matches to four sets or more, which she says is the thing she will point at in December when somebody asks whether the year was any good.

The Pine City match ran two hours and ten minutes and ended at 9:40, which put the bus back in Misquah at 10:35 on a school night, which is the part of a Monday road match that nobody schedules around and everybody complains about the next morning.