On a steamy Saturday afternoon at the Gillette Road complex in Cicero, the Baldwinsville softball team sought a chance to play again at that same facility on Wednesday night with a Section III Class AA championship stake.
Gillette served as the host for the sectional AA semifinals, where the no. 4 seed Bees would not have to worry about top seed Central Square because no. 8 seed Cicero-North Syracuse had beaten them 4-3 in the quarterfinal round.
Instead, B’ville would try to prevent the Northstars from yet another title-game appearance, and looked to be on its way to doing so before a stunning late-game comeback helped C-NS prevail, 2-1, and leave the Bees profoundly disappointed.
B’ville, the no. 4 seed in Class AA, had started its playoff run by putting together an impressive all-around effort in last Wednesday’s quarterfinal, an 8-2 victory over no. 5 seed Utica Proctor.
No doubt, the Bees remembered that the Raiders had reached the sectional finals the year before, so it was ready for a challenge. It also helped to have Keanna Wolcik, who had a no-hitter going through six innings before getting removed in the seventh in favor of Emma Bernet.
The reason was simple – Wolcik’s arm was needed later in the sectional tournament, and B’ville had a comfortable lead. With two runs in the bottom of the second, the Bees began a stretch where it got runs in four consecutive frames, capped by a three-run fifth inning.
Allie Hotchkiss had a bases-clearing triple and finished with four RBIs, a season-high total. Wolcik’s three hits included a double as she, along with Madison Ascioti and Sarah Lalla, drove in runs. Shelby Stisser walked twice and scored three runs.
Now it was on to C-NS, a team B’ville had beaten twice in the regular season, by margins of 4-1 and 1-0.
Those close scores symbolized a spring where the normally reliable Northstars had dropped plenty of close contests, but had turned that around in the playoffs with late-game rallies that upended Auburn 5-4 in eight innings and then stunned Central Square 4-3 in the quarterfinals.
For a while, though, the third B’ville-C-NS encounter resembled the first two. Wolcik blanked the Northstars over the first five innings and was working her way to 12 strikeouts.
Meanwhile, C-NS pitcher Ariana Corasaniti was just as stingy, with one exception. In the bottom of the third, with the game still 0-0, Corasaniti hung a pitch that the Bees’ Kayla Young sent over the fence for a solo home run.
Though Corasaniti gave up six hits, she didn’t allow any more runs, patiently waiting for her teammates to solve Wolcik – which they finally did. In the top of the sixth, a Northstars run tied it, 1-1, and in the seventh it got the go-ahead run.
Beth Bonin and Sam Shallcross drove in those runs as they combined to account for four of C-NS’s five hits. Janelle Walters had the other, scoring a run. Young, in defeat, had another hit to go with her round-tripper as Wolcik, Lalla, Hotchkiss and Jillian Dunn with one hit apiece.
So once again, it would be C-NS against Liverpool (who beat West Genesee 8-3 in the other semifinal) playing for the sectional title, and once again it was B’ville ending a season that had plenty of accomplishments, but not the big prize it wanted.
