He comes over the top. And suddenly Larrobino is in motion, both knees and the left shoulder dipping slightly, the aluminum bat a blur in the sunlight. That aluminum-on-cowhide sound – chink, like someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon – is different this time. A lot different. Not chink but crunch as Ryan connects, and then the ball is in the sky, tracking out to left field – a long shot that is clearly gone, high, wide, and handsome into the summer afternoon. The ball will later be recovered from beneath a car about 275 feet away from home plate.

The expression on twelve-year-old Mike Tardif’s face is stunned, thunderstruck disbelief. He takes one quick look into his glove, as if hoping to find the ball still there and discover that Larrobino’s dramatic two-strike, two-out shot was only a hideous momentary dream. The two women behind the backstop look at each other in total amazement. At first, no one makes a sound. In that moment before everyone begins to scream and the Bangor West players rush out of their dugout to await Ryan at home plate and mob him when he arrives, only two people are entirely sure that it did really happen. One is Ryan himself. As he rounds first, he raises both hands to his shoulders in a brief but emphatic gesture of triumph. And, as Owen King crosses the plate with the first of the three runs that will end Hampden’s All-Star season, Mike Tardif realizes. Standing on the pitcher’s rubber for the last time as a Little Leaguer, he bursts into tears.

‘You gotta remember, they’re only twelve,’ each of the three coaches says at one time or another, and each time one of them says it, the listener feels that he – Mansfield, Waterman, or St. Pierre – is really reminding himself.

‘When you are on the field, we’ll love you and you will love each other,’ Waterman tells the boys again and again, and in the wake of Bangor’s eleventh-hour, 15-14 win over Hampden, when they all did love each other, the boys no longer laugh at this.