Staff photo / Preston Byers Warren G. Harding’s Xavier Clark drives to the basket during a game against Austintown Fitch in Austintown on Tuesday.

AUSTINTOWN — Free throws proved to be Warren G. Harding’s undoing Tuesday. As the Raiders missed three critical pairs of foul shots in the final minute, league rival Austintown Fitch successfully mounted a thrilling 45-44 comeback win that E.J. Giles punctuated with a buzzer-beater.

“Typical grind-it-out, slug-it-out, momentum goes to one side and it swings back to the other. Just a lot of ebbs and flows. But I wouldn’t expect anything else,” Fitch head coach Brian Beany said. “Both teams battled. Give the players on both teams a ton of credit. It just came down to we made one more shot than they did. That’s basketball.”

Despite their late heroics, the Falcons largely stumbled through the first half of Tuesday’s All-American Conference game.

After surrendering the first basket of the game, Harding scored eight unanswered points, mostly from back-to-back Khi Blutcher triples, and took a four-point lead into the second quarter. There, the Raiders created distance between themselves and the Falcons, who would have been outscored 9-2 over the final four minutes of the half had Giles, in a moment of foreshadowing, made a buzzer-beating putback to trim the deficit at the break to eight.

“The first half, we were more reactionary,” Beany said. “They were one step ahead of us in a lot of things. … I don’t think we ever got into a rhythm, and offensively, we were in kind of a slog. We weren’t moving well. We were trying to do too much one-on-one to try to create something, and that’s not really who we are.”

Fitch began its comeback in earnest as the halfway point of the third quarter neared. The Falcons scored eight in a row to pull within two points with 3:15 left in the period, and with 22.3 remaining, a spinning layup and free throw by A.J. Diaz tied the game heading into the fourth quarter.

The final period featured only five total field goals, as both teams spent considerable time at the free-throw line. Those trips to the charity stripe proved immensely more heartbreaking for the Raiders, though.

After a three-and-half-minute stretch in which neither team scored while tied at 39, Matt Richardson split a pair of free throws with 2:06 left to give Harding a one-point lead. Less than 30 seconds later, Xavier Clark, who had been largely bottled up due to a defensive adjustment by Fitch, finished a fast-break layup to put his team up by three.

On the next offensive possession, the Falcons’ Giles threw the ball away, and Clark subsequently put Harding ahead by five with 68 seconds to go. Diaz pulled it back to a three-point game with two free throws with under a minute left.

With a chance to make it a two-possession game with 43.8 seconds to go, Tyler Smith missed both free throws. He was joined by Blutcher and Clark in doing so, as they came up empty with 15.8 and 8.6 seconds remaining, respectively. Clark’s free throws came after Brady Evans put the Falcons within one at the other end.

“We haven’t been a great free-throw-shooting team, but if you would have told me that we would miss five out of six, I really wouldn’t have thought we would have done that,” Harding head coach Keelyn Franklin said. “We thought we were in a position where if we just split, we would have been good, but obviously we didn’t. So it just gave them an opportunity to stick around, and they made us pay for it.”

Beany called his final timeout and drew up a play with 7.9 seconds to go, but when the ball went out of bounds off a Harding player with one second left, he had to hurriedly call out to Giles before the most consequential moment of the game.

Giles, at his coach’s request, flashed to an open spot in the defense and quickly put up a floater, which went through the net as the buzzer sounded, and the Falcon faithful erupted.

“He’s 6’5,” Beany said. “Catch it, turn, shoot. How many times does he make that out of 10? I don’t know. But tonight he did.”

With the win, Fitch improved to 7-3 on the season and 2-0 in league play. The Falcons head to Canfield on Friday for another AAC matchup.

As for Harding (4-4, 0-1 in AAC), Tuesday’s loss marked its third straight defeat as a rivalry game at Howland on Friday looms.

“I’m proud of their effort, and we’ve gotten a lot better. … We’re trending in the right direction, and we’ll continue to get better,” Franklin said. “Obviously, Howland is going to be a tough matchup for us, a rivalry-type game, another tough atmosphere. We’re on a six-game road trip, so some adversity for us, but that’s life. When adversity hits and things aren’t going your way, how do you respond? I told them, if I have the group I believe we have, we’ll respond and have the best practice of the year tomorrow.”