Staff photo / Neel Madhavan Girard’s Chloe Plant swings at a pitch during the Indians’ comeback win over Hubbard on Friday at Hubbard High School.

HUBBARD — Through the first few weeks of the season, the Girard softball team was trending in the wrong direction, coming off its fourth straight loss.

Since then, however, the Indians have flipped the script. Their bats have caught fire and they’ve been on a roll. That continued on Friday, as Girard put together a four-run sixth inning to rally past Hubbard 8-5 and notch its sixth straight victory.

“This is a huge win for our program. Since I’ve been here, I don’t think that we’ve beaten those guys,” Indians head coach James Keagy said. “We’ve been waiting, hoping, wishing and getting ready and prepared for this moment to win a game like that. That’s a very good team. They got some great hitters, and their pitcher does a wonderful job. So just a big win for our program.”

Through the first two innings, the Eagles (10-4, 6-3 NE8) built up an early 3-0 advantage off a two-run home run by Layla Songer and an RBI base hit by Ashley Masluk.

Then after a slow start, the Indians (9-7, 3-5 NE8) finally broke through in the top of the third inning when Brooklyn Broll’s single scored Caylee Wilkes and Gianna Saxon.

In the bottom of the frame, Morgan Thompson’s RBI double extended Hubbard’s lead. But Girard quickly responded when Wilkes put a ball just out of reach of the left fielder, scoring two runs to tie things up at 4 in the top of the fourth.

“We didn’t want to let things get out of control,” Keagy said. “We talked about, if you make a mistake, shake it off, get the next one because mistakes are going to be made, errors are going to be made. You gotta shake that off and get ready to make the next play and be ready to go.”

After five innings, the Eagles sat on a 5-4 lead after Haleigh Taylor struck out the side in the top of the inning and batted in the go-ahead run in the bottom of the fourth.

Hubbard had chances to add to its total through those early innings, but it left six runners on base, including three in scoring position.

“It was just one of those nights we couldn’t get the base runners that we needed,” Eagles assistant coach Ron Taylor said. “But we’re going to keep battling. We got a long season still ahead of us with playoffs and everything.”

Despite the rough fifth inning, the Indians started to find their rhythm at the plate in the top of the sixth. Girard had four hits off Taylor and capitalized on a pair of Hubbard fielding errors to score four runs and pull ahead for the first time.

“We’re never going to give up,” Keagy said. “We’re going to keep competing every pitch, every play and every time we get an opportunity at bat. So it’s that no-die mentality. We get a couple hits, we get some traffic on base and we hit and run. We talked about hitting and running, and that’s what we preach.”

During the inning, Chloe Plant had a two-run base hit, while Saxon and Kyra Bell followed suit with RBIs of their own.

“I just think we kind of lost focus a little bit. We’ve been working on that the last couple games,” Ron Taylor said. “We’ve been in games, competing, and we just kind of lose our focus a little bit. We just gotta keep working on that. We’re a young team. We’ve got five sophomores out there.”

Plant pitched the first three innings for Girard. But then Broll came in and shut things down for the Indians.

She gave up just that one run in the bottom of the fourth, but then kept the Eagles scoreless through each of the final three innings.

“We’ve got two great pitchers in Chloe Plant and Brooklyn Broll,” Keagy said. “After Chloe went through their lineup a couple times, we said, ‘let’s give them a switch.’ Brooklyn’s a different style of pitcher, so we wanted to let her go in there and do her thing.”

Girard continues Northeast 8 Conference play on Monday when it travels to face Poland, while Hubbard is scheduled to head across the border today to face West Middlesex (Pa.) at 11 a.m.