This was supposed to be the end of the road for the Gordon Lee Trojans. Facing Georgia’s top-ranked Class A high school baseball team on the road was going to be too much for a team with eight first-year starters.

If that was the intended script, someone forgot to tell the “Road Trojans,” who knocked off Aquinas 8-6 Thursday in Augusta to win their best-of-three GHSA second-round series two games to one. Gordon Lee (20-8) will take its show on the road again Tuesday, traveling to Columbus to play Brookstone in the quarterfinal round.

“Never, ever have I been more proud of a group of kids than I am with these guys,” Gordon Lee coach Greg Payne said Thursday. “We were very relaxed and I was very impressed with the kids’ approach. We scored a run in the first inning on a trick play and one in the second on no hits. Our execution in those innings was big. After that, it was clutch hit after clutch hit.”

With the score 2-2 entering the fifth inning, senior Paden Harris put the Trojans ahead for good with a two-run double off reliever Andrew Foushee, Aquinas’ ace who dealt Gordon Lee a 9-3 loss in Wednesday’s game one. Brandon Daggett followed with an RBI single to make it 5-2.

Harris, who earned his second pitching win of the series by going four innings, tired in the fifth after allowing the first two Aquinas batters to reach. Senior Zack DeBord, who had to leave his Wednesday game-two start due to illness, came on to allow only those two runners to score.

The Trojans added three runs off Foushee in the top of the seventh, two on Taylor Eberhardt’s two-out single. The Irish (27-4) gave the home crowd a finish in the bottom half, getting the tying runs on base before DeBord induced the team’s No. 8 batter to fly out.

“Paden gave us everything he had, and in the fifth he was right at his usual pitch limit and he was looking a bit shaky,” Payne said. “Zack came in, and though two runs did score, he got the outs and we never lost the lead.”