MISHAWAKA — Once you navigate all those black days and all those gold days during those four years, that first day of your last week as a Penn High School senior falls somewhere between agonizing and awful.
Four more days before you can finally put it all in the past. Turn the page. Look forward to graduation and parties and summer and what life after high school might offer. First, you must get through those final four days.
Easier said than done, especially when you have something pretty darn important waiting at the end of the first one. Like, say, playing a sectional baseball championship game.
Monday felt more like a week. Classes couldn’t be done fast enough. That final bell couldn’t come soon enough. Let’s go.
For most of Monday, June 1, Penn High School senior baseball player Bennett Hartford tried the best he could to remain a student. To stay focused on what he had to focus on and not worry or wonder about what might happen later in the evening.
Once that final bell sounded at 3:17 p.m., Hartford was no longer a senior who had made it through the first of those final four days. He was a first baseman ready to get across town to Baker Park and face one-time conference rival Mishawaka for sectional championship No. 26 in program history.
He was ready to flip the switch from senior student to senior baseball player. What does that flip feel like? That switch look like?
“Just preparation,” Hartford said. “Then, it’s more energy. You can’t really be crazy in school. You got to be on the books in the morning, then get your mindset right. When school gets out, it’s all baseball.
“Just leave it all on the field.”
The lead-up may have been long, but Hartford and the Kingsmen made the game look relatively easy, if also long. Penn batted around in each of the first two innings. It loaded the bases three times over the first four. It scored early. It scored often. It looked headed for a run-rule sectional win before a 9-3 victory that delivered said sectional title and extended the postseason for a few more days.
“That was the biggest thing we talked about pregame — step on them as soon as possible,” Hartford said. “That’s exactly what we did.”
Hitting cleanup, Hartford cleaned the bases with a ringing triple to the right-field wall in the bottom of the first (Penn was the home team). While teammates Jackson Trenerry and Mason Biernacki scored, Hartford punctuated his big blast with a head-first slide into third. It set the table for what was to come from the Kingsmen.
“Playing with pure intensity,” he said. “I’m going crazy, nine times out of 10, they’re going to be crazy, too.”
They saw a lot of pitches. They put a lot of runners on base. They applied pressure so early and so often that the Cavemen just couldn’t handle it.
Play a team like Penn, to beat a team like Penn, you better be flawless early. Send them down in order. Scratch out a few runs. Get some confidence flowing before all those fans in all those cars lined in both directions along Byrkit Avenue could make their way through the Baker Park admissions booth and find a place to park. Then sit.
The Cavemen couldn’t deliver.
“You can’t let a good team like Penn get that far ahead,” said Mishawaka coach John Huemmer, his team finished at 17-11. “Exactly what we didn’t want to happen in those first two innings happened.
“It was like, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
While Penn’s offense was good from the jump, it took some time for starting pitcher Cayden Stockbridge, the team’s ace, to dial it in. He wasn’t on the ropes in the opening innings, but he wasn’t necessarily No. 1 starter sharp. Or smooth.
He labored through long counts. He couldn’t hit his spots. He tried to ignore the activity down the rightfield line as the Kingsmen bullpen was active early, but that was difficult. Distracting, even.
Stockbridge settled down and settled in. He played the part of an ace. He found his rhythm and the Cavemen never could capitalize. The Penn offense had been so efficient — it was 9-1 after three — that it was almost startling to see Stockbridge not allow a hit into the fifth.
Like, really?
“There were times where I’d be too amped up,” Stockbridge said. “I just needed to take my time. Breathe. Make sure I stay within myself and be me.”
Turns out that Mishawaka’s first hit — a double by senior catcher Kamdon Putz — was the last pitch Stockbridge would throw. He worked 4.1 innings before turning it over to the bullpen.
Just another game? Not for Stockbridge. He awoke Monday the same way he’ll wake up the rest of the week. Hopefully, for Penn, the rest of this month, knowing that this next game might be his last game.
Stockbridge won’t run from the magnitude of these postseason moments.
“We’ve seen it the last two years,” Stockbridge said. “We just have to come and compete and take the game away. It motivates us a lot.”
Penn (23-6) advances to Saturday’s one-game regional championship, a place its season ended a year ago, something that Hartford and his fellow seniors remember well. Put it so far in the past that they don’t think of that day down in Nappanee against Goshen? Hardly. They think about it. A lot.
That day hurt. It still does.
“There are teams out there who can beat you who you don’t think can beat you,” Hartford said. “Every guy wants this for the guy next to him. Nobody’s trying to be a hero. Play every game like your last because it is.”
Saturday’s shot at regional redemption — a shot to extend the season longer than last year — will be here before you know it. Just get through a few more days of school.
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: This is what Penn High School baseball does come sectional title time
Reporting by Tom Noie, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
