There was joy in Devin Moran’s camp after Saturday night’s 35th Pittsburgher at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway.

But in the pit stalls of Brandon Overton and Tim McCreadie? Not so much.

It was Moran who came out on top in the three-way points battle for the fourth and final available spot in the Big River Steel Big Four that will determine the 2023 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series champion during Oct. 20-21’s season-ending Dirt Track World Champions at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, putting the 29-year-old from Dresden, Ohio, in a jovial mood while Evans, Ga.’s Overton and Watertown, N.Y.’s McCreadie were left wondering what could have been.

Moran’s runner-up finish in the 75-lap feature — combined with McCreadie’s third-place result and Overton’s ninth-place run after mechanical trouble knocked him from third late in the distance — allowed him to erase his 15-point deficit to Overton entering the penultimate event of the Lucas Oil Series campaign. The Buckeye State driver ended the night sitting fourth in the standings, 30 points ahead of the dead-locked McCreadie and Overton to join $30,000 race winner Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind. (fourth-place finisher) and Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga. (eighth) as the national tour’s Big Four qualifiers.

While Moran would have been eliminated from title contention several races ago under the traditional Lucas Oil Series points format — and Thornton, sitting atop the standings by an enormous 530 points over O’Neal following his 19th full-field and 23rd overall tour victory of the season, would already have the championship clinched — the $200,000 champion’s bounty will this year go to the highest finisher among the Big Four in the 100-lap DTWC. Moran was a supporter of the much-discussed concept when it was it announced last December and now finds himself back in the game because of it.

“I loved it,” Moran said when asked about the Big River Steel Big Four program while happily standing inside his Double Down Motorsports trailer after Saturday’s post-race ceremonies. “And to be honest, it’s funny, because a lot of people don’t, and I do, and I’ve benefitted from it. I was like a thousand points behind Ricky, and now I’m zero. We’ll all have orange (points-leader) spoilers on at Eldora and it’ll be game on.”

As the deciding Pittsburgher passed its halfway point, though, it appeared that Moran’s hopes for a berth in the Big Four might fall short. At lap 50 he had advanced from the seventh starting spot to sit fourth with McCreadie, who entered the event 20 points behind Moran, sitting fifth, but ahead of him in third was Overton.

Despite ceding second back to Thornton on a lap-47 restart, Overton had a solid grasp on third place. Moran needed to beat Overton by two positions to overtake him in the standings, so the Georgian was in the driver’s seat.

Then came the fateful 54th lap. Overton, 33, slowed to bring out a caution flag and pulled into the infield hot pit, where his crew and members of several other teams swarmed over his car and discovered the problem that had prompted him to fall off the pace.

“Something come up through there and knocked the fan blades and the power steering line off of it,” Overton said, shaking his head in frustration while leaning against a counter in his trailer after settling for a ninth-place finish. “I felt it vibrating so I was like, ‘It’s gonna blow up,’ and the power steering goes out, so then I thought it did blow up. I looked down and it still had oil pressure (but thought) it was actually pushing (oil) … I couldn’t see and it was actually power steering fluid dumping all over everything.

“You’re going so fast and I didn’t know what to do, so I just stopped.”

Overton rejoined the race after his pit stop and completed the distance, but he said afterward that bypassing a visit to the pits and attempting to ride out his troubles wouldn’t have changed his result.

“I was gonna fall back to where I was anyway,” Overton said. “I just went back out there because maybe they’d (Moran and McCreadie) wad their (stuff) on the last lap or whatever and maybe we’d get in (to the Big Four). But I couldn’t (maintain third place). You’re going too fast here. You can’t keep up … or I’m not strong enough to turn it without power steering.”

Moran’s eyes, of course, grew wide when he saw Overton fall from contention. But he didn’t allow himself to relax upon inheriting third place with 21 laps remaining.

“I didn’t really know what happened (to Overton), whether it was ignition or motor or whatever,” Moran said. “I didn’t even know if he was out there anymore. I was still thinking, Do what I can to try and win. I just gotta try to win.

“Ricky (Thornton) and J.D. (Davenport) were obviously slicing and dicing (for the lead). I was trying to catch them but I wasn’t quite good enough, so I was just focused on making good, clean laps.”

Moran ultimately moved into second on a lap-72 restart that followed a caution flag for debris off Davenport’s car; Thornton’s winning pass the previous circuit resulted in Davenport slapping the second-turn wall and tearing up his car’s right-rear corner, causing him to fade over the final laps. Making no mistakes, Moran stayed ahead of McCreadie for the final three trips around the half-mile oval to secure his spot in the Eldora championship drama.

McCreadie, 49, spent the race’s late stages riding out the laps with others’ misfortunate effectively being his only hope for a Big Four berth.

“I was gonna pit and try something different with like 30 to go, but once Brandon got to second, it didn’t make any sense,” said McCreadie, who needed to beat Overton by at least four positions and Moran by at least three. “It doesn’t matter … if he’s running second, even if I get all the way through there and beat him, it doesn’t make any difference. So why would I pull in?

“Then when Brandon had whatever happened to him, I was like, ‘Well, maybe we’ll get lucky.’ I thought I was better than Moran at the end. I know it was three to go, but I didn’t need that yellow. The way it was shaking out, I think I could’ve got by him. But it still wouldn’t have mattered.”

McCreadie officially saw his bid for a third consecutive Lucas Oil Series title snuffed out by his failure to crack the top four in the points standings. He was philosophical about his fate, which he felt might have been different if he had started running the new Longhorn car he debuted two weeks ago at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway a bit earlier.

“It don’t matter to me. All’s we can do is look forward,” said McCreadie, whose two Lucas Oil Series victories this season have come in split-field semifeatures. “It’s unfortunate … we were way better since we had this car out. It would’ve been nice to see what could’ve happened maybe.”

Saturday marked McCreadie’s fourth top-five finish in five starts in his fresh machine, a Longhorn Chassis that was sitting at Wesley Page’s shop for Carson Ferguson of Lincolnton, N.C., who races with support from McCreadie’s Paylor Motorsports owner Donald Bradsher. Bradsher decided to have the car readied for McCreadie instead as the team looks toward 2024 and racing out of their own shop rather than as the Longhorn house car.

“We have to start on our own anyway, so there’s no reason to continue on doing the same thing, you know what I mean?” McCreadie said. “Especially when it wasn’t working.”

Considering that McCreadie’s season hasn’t been championship caliber, he felt fortunate just to still have a shot at the title under the new Big Four deal.

“It’s OK,” McCreadie said of the chase-style format. “I mean, I would feel bad if I was Ricky (having a big points lead wiped out for a one-race shootout). If you’re gonna play the odds, the odds are he shouldn’t win, because it’s three against one.

“But as far as how our year went, I thought, Well, it’s good that this is available. I would think it made this race more exciting than it usually is. And this is probably a good place to have (the deciding Big Four race), because you can come and go and there’s a lot of things that can happen. It’s a racy track, so it’s probably good that it was here.

“But it’s OK,” he added. “It’s so much more money (on the series this year) that you can’t complain. Now hopefully we can go in there (to Eldora) and try to make a hundred-grand (for winning the DTWC). That’s it.”

Overton mourned his disappointing outcome similarly to McCreadie. The Big Four format is what prompted him and his David Wells-owned team to tackle the Lucas Oil Series for the first time this season but he didn’t perform up to his typical standards, winning just three times (two full-field, one semifeature) while struggling for much of the season. He even tried to shake up his program in Friday night’s Lucas Oil show at Raceway 7 in Conneaut, Ohio, by running a Team Zero car that his friend, Grant Pearl, had previously purchased from Ahnna Parkhurst’s team, but electrical problems prevented him from turning a qualifying lap and running a heat and he switched back to his usual Longhorn car for the feature (he finished 13th and saw his 80-point edge over Moran and McCreadie shrink considerably) and Saturday’s action.

“Obviously s— ain’t meant to be,” said Overton, who will battle McCreadie for the $75,000 fifth-place spot in the points standings at Eldora. “We did everything right (Saturday). We qualified good, we won our heat, we started up front and was staying up front. I know me and J.D. were relying on that top leaving two too heavily, so I figured when the brown died (Thornton) was gonna come trucking back up through there. I felt like we was gonna run third, and that would’ve been good enough, so …

“It don’t matter. If I was as fast as I was last year we wouldn’t be in this situation we are now, so it really don’t make a damn. We were comfortable about Eldora when we went to the first one (the Dream) we went to (this year) and we wasn’t good, so it’s really no big excitement going back (for the DTWC).

“We gotta get our car better,” he added. “Like I told ‘em earlier, being that close to losing fourth place (in the points) doesn’t thrill me none, you know what I mean? It costs way too much money to run up and down the road and run like s—, so we’re just gonna keep on working and when we get fast we’ll win and we can go wherever we want to go and run up front and it all makes sense.”

Concluded Overton: We gave it our all. We did everything we could. S— happens.”

For Moran, cracking the Big Four at the last possible moment culminated a late-season push that he hopes will carry over to Eldora.

“Yeah, we snuck in, but at the same time, we didn’t, you know?” said Moran, whose two Lucas Oil Series victories this season include the $50,000 Show-Me 100. “My guys worked really hard. I think they said we have 16 top-10s in a row and the last four races have been two thirds and two seconds, so we’ve just been getting better and better. Who knows? We might pull (the championship) off somehow.

“The team’s worked really, really hard and (car owner) Roger (Sellers) given us everything we need to get there. Now we’ve put ourselves in position so we just gotta make it happen.”

Perhaps Moran now can even break the so-called Eldora Curse that has plagued his family since his father Donnie’s victory in the 2001 Eldora Million. Neither Donnie nor Devin has won at Eldora over the past 22 years, so capturing the DTWC and a Lucas Oil title would snap that dry spell in spectacular fashion.

“Winning the Million (last year) would’ve been the perfect way (to end the curse), but I’ll take this,” Moran said. “It would be pretty awesome. It would be a helluva way to finish the year, I can promise you that.”