Brenden Gilbert lashed a key RBI single as Coupeville’s JV edged La Conner 9-8 Friday. (John Fisken photos)
Dane Lucero, seen here in an earlier game, saved the game with an alert defensive play on the mound.
It ended with a bang.
To the joy of the road fans, that bang was the ball smacking in to Wolf pitcher Dane Lucero’s glove and staying put, wrapping a wild game that finished minutes before the sun set Friday.
As Lucero snatched a La Conner liner out of midair and squeezed it tightly for the final out, stranding the tying run 90 feet from home, the rest of the Coupeville High School JV baseball squad went bonkers behind him.
And why not?
Having held on for a 9-8 win, the young Wolves are now a flawless 3-0 on the season.
They’ll get a chance to quickly test that, with a JV-only doubleheader in Oak Harbor Saturday (11 AM) against the Wildcats C-Team, which is 0-2.
Playing a four-inning game in La Conner, Coupeville built a big lead, gave it all almost back, pulled back ahead, then weathered a final storm (and a scoreboard operator who took nearly an hour to credit the Wolves with what turned out to be the winning run).
For one half inning, the CHS young guns looked like world beaters, raining down six runs in the top of the first.
Taking advantage of a wild Brave hurler, who plunked two of the first three batters he faced, the Wolves scored twice on wild pitches and another time on a bases-loaded walk to Cameron Toomey-Stout.
Lucero lofted a sac fly to plate another run, while Nick Etzell and Brenden Gilbert also delivered RBI hits.
Etzell lashed a shot down the third-base line that hooked and hooked and hooked some more, but somehow hit pay dirt a millimeter inside fair territory, skipping away for a standup double.
While Gilbert’s base knock wasn’t as dramatic, it was pretty, a frozen rope to dead center for an RBI single.
After Lucero retired La Conner on just three pitches in the bottom half of the inning, garnering two ground-outs and a fly-out before Joey Lippo, making his season catching debut behind the plate, even got settled, the game looked like a blow-out.
It wasn’t to be, though.
First, the scoreboard operator went AWOL (maybe on a dinner run?), failing to post Coupeville’s sixth run until moments before the end of the game, then La Conner started to rally.
Five runs in the second made things tight, and let the locals think they were in a tie game.
As suddenly as both offenses exploded, they went largely silent, other than Julian Welling beating out an infield single for the Wolves, only to take a header over the first-base bag and bounce his noggin off the infield.
He was more sheepish than seriously hurt, however.
“Oh, it was sooooo nice that it entertained all you guys,” he said, with a deep sigh, a grin and much eye rolling as he obtained an ice pack later.
Coupeville stretched its lead back out to 9-5 with three runs in the top of the fourth, all of them coming home on passed balls, as a new, but no less wild, La Conner pitcher threw the ball everywhere but his catcher’s glove.
Lucero, Etzell and Cameron Dahl trotted home with the decisive runs.
With the sun dipping and both teams agreeing to end the game after four innings, the Wolves decided to make coach Chris Smith sweat things out a bit.
A single, a double, a walk and an error brought home one run, but a pop-up and a huge strike-out fired by Lucero seemed to mute things.
La Conner had something left, though, with the potential final batter cracking a two-run single up the middle to pull the Braves within a run.
With their fans suddenly, finally, making some noise to rival the always-boisterous Wolf cheering section, La Conner swung from the heels with runners at the corners.
Bat hit ball, a roar went up and BOOM, Lucero alertly flipped his mitt skyward, snatched the liner and a second, much louder, roar went up from Coupeville’s side of the bleachers.
Undefeated and on to Oak Harbor.
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