BELLEVILLE – Tomi Dublo walked to the plate for her two-out, eighth inning at-bat wanting nothing more than scoring the Redbird standing on third base.

“I wasn’t looking for anything special,” she said.

But special is what Dublo’s first-pitch swing produced. Her two-run home run over the fence in center field provided the winning runs in Alton’s 4-2 eight-inning Southwestern Conference softball victory over the Belleville East Lancers.

East is 7-2 and 1-1 in the SWC. The Redbirds recovered from a defensive meltdown — “It was a meltdown,” Alton coach Dan Carter confirmed – that enabled the Lancers to draw even at 2-2 in the sixth inning to stay unbeaten at 8-0.

That perfect getaway that includes a 4-2 SWC victory over O’Fallon on Thursday is significant for the Redbirds. “That’s a pretty darn good week, isn’t it?,” Carter said of a 2-0 conference start against two perennial SWC powers.

For pitcher Alton senior Brittany Roady, 8-0 has a more basic meaning. “That just means we have to come out and be 9-0 on Tuesday,” Roady said.

Tuesday brings another SWC challenge when the Redbirds play at home against three-time defending league champion Edwardsville.

“I just told the girls, enjoy the heck out of this tonight and come into practice ready to work because we’ve got Edwardsville on Tuesday. At 2:20 tomorrow when we get ready to practice, it’s time to go back to work,” said Carter, who rejected any suggestion that the Tigers are down a bit in 2016. “Like I’ve been saying all year, until somebody knocks (Edwardsville) off, they’re at the top of the heap.

“You can say they’re down, people may be saying that, but they’re still Edwardsville and they’re still the Southwestern Conference reigning champion.”

The Redbirds took down one traditional nemesis in the Lancers. East had won 17 of its last 18 dates with Alton. And the Redbirds had not won at East since 2004. “I don’t care what year it is, you come in here and get a win,” Carter said, “you’ve got to be proud of your girls.”

Roady continued her stellar start, improving to 8-0 while lowering her ERA to 0.57.

“We’ve got to give props to Brittany Roady,” Dublo said. “She’s been throwing really good. My team’s been doing really good and we have to stay as team.”

Roady struck out seven, walked no one and gave five hits. Both of East’s runs were unearned in a sixth inning that saw the Redbirds commit three of their four errors.

“We’re still learning,” Carter said. “It is high school sports for a reason. We’re still teaching and we’re still learning. But we responded.”

East squandered an opportunity to seize momentum in the first inning when Jessica Belzer’s single and Alton’s outfield error put a runner on third base with nobody out. But Roady got a strikeout, a come-backer to the circle and a foul pop to strand the Lancer at third. “That was huge,” Carter said.

East coach Natalie Peters agreed. “We have to score in that situation,” she said. “And we did not execute that. We’re better than that. We’ll fix it.”

Alton broke through with a run in the fourth inning when Bronte Fencel’s infield single off the pitcher’s glove scored Savannah Fisher from third. The Redbirds made it 2-0 in the sixth inning when Tami Wong led off with an infield single and went to third on a throwing error. She would score on a passed ball.

After East tied it in the bottom of the sixth, it still had the bases loaded with one out. Roady’s wild pitch sent the runner home from third, but Alton catcher Miranda Hudson made a quick retreat to the short backstop and fed Roady to cut down the runner at the plate.

“That would have been the game,” Carter said.

Instead, the Redbirds reached extra innings and Dublo delivered. “I did not know it was going to go out,” Dublo said of her third homer. “I was hoping – obviously.”

Fencel and Wong each finished with two hits for Alton, which will seek its first SWC sweep of East since 2004 when the Lancers visit Godfrey on April 26.

“They played a very good softball game today,” Peters said of the Redbirds. “And, honestly, I think they deserved to win. I think they outplayed us. We just have to get our offense figured out. It’s not where it needs to be.”

Still, back-to-back wins over O’Fallon and East was significant for an Alton program seeking its first-ever SWC championship.

“This one was really big because we know Belleville East is really tough,” Roady said. “We knew that coming in, we knew that before the game watching them warm up, we had to be on top of our game. We had a little fluke inning, but any game can have that. We’ve just got to come back and battle. And we did.”

ALTON 4, BELLEVILLE EAST 2

Alton 000 101 02 — 4 8 4

East 000 002 00 — 2 5 1

Alton (8-0, 2-0) – Presley 1-4, Wong 2-4, Dublo 1-4 HR RBI-2, Hartman 1-3, Fencel 2-3. WP-Roady IN-8.0 H-5 R-2 ER-2 BB-0 K-7.

Belleville East (7-3, 1-1) – Belzer 2-4 2B, Mossman 1-4, Blomberg 1-3, Laidley 1-3. LP-Vanderpluym IN-5.0 H-6 R-2 ER-1 BB-0 K-5.

Greg Shashack may be reached at 618-798-1486 or on Twitter @gregshashack