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Cottonwood Heights • Eventually it was bound to happen. At long last, at the end of a volleyball match no one wanted to relinquish, somebody was bound to win enough rallies to gain the final two-point advantage to put away a late-season region battle royale between rivals Bingham and Brighton.

Finally, after playing Bingham every year since 2011 and losing eight matches in a row, it was Brighton that beat back the Miners 27-25, 25-21, 21-25, 23-25, 21-19 on Friday night.

"I feel so pumped and so happy right now," Bengals junior middle hitter LeighAnne Taylor said. "We we were just so focused and wanting to work together because we're a family — [to] kill this team that we've wanted to beat so long."

The marathon fifth game took its final turn when Taylor's kill broke a 19-19 deadlock. Brighton (19-7, 9-1) then got the victory when a shot by Bingham's Gabbi Shumway caught the top of the net and fell back to the Miners' side.

"We've been working for this, the girls set a goal. We should have lost that five or six different times, but they just kept going," said Brighton coach Adam Fernandez, whose team pushed its way to the top of the Region 3 standings with Bingham — with two contests for both teams next week to finish the regular season.

"There's so many that hit the tape and rolled over, balls that you didn't know which way they were going to go," Fernandez said. "Some went ours, some went theirs. A great match."

Junior stalwart Dani Barton amassed 29 kills for Brighton while fellow University of Utah commit Torre Glasker led the Miners with 24 winners.

Glasker's lone service ace of the match, followed by a combined block from Shumway and Atalina Pritchard, finished off a 4-0 run in the fifth that gave Bingham (22-4, 9-1) a 12-10 lead. The visitors were still up by two, at 13-11, when Bengals sophomore setter Emma Dunn won a 50-50 ball at the net, which started a three-point run to put the hosts at match point — the first of five before Brighton won the contest on the sixth.

"We should have won. We had multiple opportunities to put the ball down. When you're up 13-11 and you have an overpass, and you can't put it down, you're not going to win that game," Bingham coach Melissa Glasker said. "We didn't start out great at all and when you have to fight back the whole match, it's hard. I thought we played great."

Shumway took the pressure off Glasker by registering 18 kills for Bingham, which also got a dozen kills and three blocks from Pritchard.

Barton had the lion's share of putaways for Brighton, but fellow outside Liz Walker scored six kills while Taylor got seven from the middle. Dunn, aside from running the Bengals' offense, also scored four kills — often at critical moments.

"It was such a good game. I was pretty confident we could pull it out," Dunn said. "But we had to fight hard for it." —

Brighton def. Bingham 27-25, 25-21, 21-25, 23-25, 21-19

• Brighton moves into a first-place tie with Bingham in Region 3 as Dani Barton pounds 29 kills for the Bengals.

• Torre Glasker leads the Miners with 24 kills while Bingham's other regular strong side hitter, Gabbi Shumway, tallies 18.

• The largest lead by either team in the fifth game comes when Brighton takes a three-point advantage at 7-4.