HOPKINTON — When the final out was made on the field at Hopkinton High School Thursday afternoon, the St. Mary’s baseball team joined one of the most exclusive clubs a team can belong to — the club of back-to-back baseball state champions.
The Spartans join the likes of the 1987 and 1988 St. Mary’s baseball teams — on which both head coach Derek Dana and assistant coach Tim Fila played — as well as the St. John’s Prep baseball teams in 1999 and 2000 as the most recent local squads to take home two straight baseball titles.
And yet, this accomplishment by St. Mary’s will always be a little bit different. As impressive as all of those other teams’ accomplishments were, none of them had to deal with an entire missed season in the middle of title wins. The Spartans had an incredibly talented group that was supposed to come back to defend in 2020, but there was no guarantee coming into 2021 that this group would be ready to make the jump that it did.
But I suppose we should have known. Dana is a great coach who preaches the little things on the baseball field, and those little things are what won the Spartans this championship. They scored five runs on only four hits. They scored two runs on one passed ball. They turned double plays and made diving catches in the field throughout the playoffs. They got reliable pitching not only from their ace, but also from a group of newcomers who weren’t even in high school yet when the Spartans won in 2019.
And let’s not forget, St. Mary’s was 6-5 at one point this year before winning 14 of its last 15 games.
“We needed guys to step up this year, bottom line, especially on the mound,” Dana said after the win. “It was nice to have Aiven (Cabral) once a week due to the pitch count stuff, but we had to hand the ball to young guys like Eric Bridges and John Nowicki and Tommy Falasca, and those guys produced and grew up in a hurry this year.”
It was so fitting that this was the way the first state tournament after the pandemic ended. After an incredibly difficult year in so many ways, seeing a team come back and accomplish one of the most difficult tasks in all of sports — defending a championship — was the only way this year could end properly.