Similar semifinals Friday have brought the 41st Blue Moon Men’s Night Doubles to a familiar finish tonight at Kailua Racquet Club. Rookie Thomas Shubert finds himself with three guys who know their way around a Night Doubles final.

His partner, Ikaika Jobe, has won three titles, including the past two. The second-seeded team beat third-seeded Hendrik Bode and Stefan Pampulov, 6-1, 6-4, in their hourlong semifinal.

Tonight at 7, they will play top-seeded Mikael Maatta and Jan Axel Tribler, who reached every final from 2006 to ’09 but have yet to win.

“To win, we have to play like we did in the first set,” said Maatta, after he and Tribler defeated fourth-seeded Michael Wojnarowicz and Bradlee Lum-Tucker, 6-1, 7-6 (7-1). “We’ve got to make them play a lot of points.”

Hawaii’s biggest tennis event of the year started with 59 teams two weeks ago. It is the final stop on the new Hawaii Triple Crown of Tennis. Maatta and Tribler, former Hawaii Pacific All-Americans now in their 30s, won the first two and have clinched a wild card into the 2012 Honolulu Challenger, Hawaii’s only USTA Pro Circuit event.

What they really want is the tennis title that keeps getting away.

They get another chance after a flawless first set that lasted 21 minutes and a frenetic second set with huge momentum shifts.

Up 4-3, Wojnarowicz and Lum-Tucker broke Tribler’s serve. Wojnarowicz double-faulted the next game away. After Maatta held to make it 5-all, two Lum-Tucker double faults and two perfect returns gave the former Sea Warriors the advantage again.

Wojnarowicz and Lum-Tucker broke Tribler’s serve again to force the tiebreaker, and Maatta and Tribler owned it. The only point they lost came when Wojnarowicz hit a winner off the frame.

“We were just lucky,” Tribler said. “They broke down, obviously, with the double faults. We played well in the first set and they didn’t make a shot. Then, suddenly, in the second set they were making shots and we weren’t ready.”

Lum-Tucker called the winners “Scandinavian ball machines.” Earlier, two other former HPU All-Americans from Europe were not as consistent.

Bode, the new HPU tennis coach, described the loss to Jobe and Shubert as “a traditional spanking.” Pampulov, who coached HPU the past six years, lamented and lauded his opponents’ serving.

While these former HPU All-Americans struggled to hold nearly every service game, Jobe and Shubert lost more than one point on serve just once — at the end of the 25-minute first set. They won 12 of the first 14 points, seizing control of the momentum.

“We kept things simple,” Jobe said, “made a lot of first serves, kept the ball in play. We did a pretty good job of all that.”

They did a great job of neutralizing Bode’s serve, which Shubert described as “massive.”

“We managed to shank a few (returns) and they happened to drop in,” Shubert said with a grin. “We were off and running.”

Bode finally won his serve to open the second set, which was 3-all before Pampulov was broken at love. That’s all it took for Jobe to reach his fifth final.