After 13 grueling bouts it came down to number 14 before Tuesday’s wrestling match between Oak Harbor and Arlington was decided.

The Wildcats held what appeared to be a comfortable 27-15 lead at the conclusion of the 275-pound matchup, but pin fall losses at 103 and 112 pounds, followed by a forfeit at 119 and another pin in the 125-pound weight division, put Arlington right back in the thick of things.

When Jake Daniel lost by a 15-4 major decision to Dom Mangini at 130 pounds the four-point victory put Arlington in the lead 36-33, and it was up to Ben Page in the 135-pound bout.

Page took charge over his opponent, Steven White, in the first two-minute period building a 4-3 lead, and fought his way to a 7-3 victory to give the shorthanded Wildcats a 36-36 tie in the match.

“It’s just too bad I couldn’t get all the points so we could win,” Page said. “I kept on trying to turn him, but it wouldn’t work out. I kept trying to scoop his head, but he had a good base and I couldn’t get him over. At the end, I was just trying to do my best and not get too tired or stall, and try to get some more points so I could get a major decision.”

David Wasickanin opened the match for the Wildcats scoring a win via pin at 140 pounds, but Oak Harbor was forced to forfeit at 145 pounds.

Jared Tyson was pinned in the 152-pound match and Dominic Greenwade lost a tough 8-5 decision at 160 pounds to put Arlington ahead 15-6.

In one of the more exciting bouts of the evening, Miles Hartt defeated Jordan Anderson 7-6 in overtime to get the Wildcats back on the winning track.

“I’m out of shape and I’m sucking a lot of air right now,” Hartt said as he sprawled on the mat in back of the Wildcats’ bench while receiving congratulations from some of his teammates. “I hope to be down to 152 pounds for this weekend’s tournament. I weighed in tonight at 160 but we needed a guy at 171, so I bumped up. I guess I got the job done.”

Tyler Elliott pinned Arlington’s Danny Pierce at 189 pounds to tie the score 15-15 and Matt Johnston’s pin over Richard Perkins at the 1:22 mark of the second period in the 215-pound bout put the Wildcats back in the lead, 21-15.

In the 275-pound weight class, Ben Llewelyn’s pin-fall victory proved to be a pivotal one for Oak Harbor in the eventual outcome of the match.

Fresh off the football field where he was a lineman on the Wildcats’ Class 4A state championship team, the big junior was trailing 4-1 to Arlington’s Matt Dewitte in the first period when suddenly things turned around in a hurry. Llewelyn picked up his opponent and promptly slammed him to the mat, recording a pin with 27 seconds left.

“He’s a big boy,” a winded Llewelyn said after the match. “I’m just glad I was able to put six points on the board for us.”

Angry at his loss, Dewitte threw his wrestling headgear against the wall behind the team’s bench, an act which resulted in the referee deducting one point from Arlington’s team score for unsportsmanlike conduct under WIAA rules.

After Llewelyn’s win, the Wildcats ran into some major problems in the lower weight divisions until Page’s victory pulled the match out.

“We saw a lot of areas tonight that we worked on well and a lot of areas we can improve on,” coach Mike Crebbin said. “This was just our first dual match of the season and we have alot more of them left to go. We are really thin, personnel wise, in the lighter weights, so right now we are just trying to fill all the weight classes by moving guys around. We also had some illnesses that kept some guys out of the match tonight and when you don’t have any extra guys, you are kind of stuck. All the kids fought hard tonight.”

Oak Harbor wrestles today in the Graham Morin Invitational tournament at Squalicum.