BELLEVUE — One of the toughest things to do in sports is getting over a season-ending loss, to make sure that one result does not ruin an otherwise quality season.
The Columbia River baseball team took more than 30 minutes to say goodbye to its season Saturday evening, the players standing in a circle in right field, expressing their feelings for one another.
“All these guys are my brothers,” senior Andrew Haley said. “Simple as that. They’re my family. I’ve been with them the last three months every single day, and I just love them all.”
The family fell a game short of the state semifinals, but they remained a family.
O’Dea of Seattle scored in each of the first four innings and finished off Columbia River’s season with a 9-4 victory in the Bellevue Regional final of the Class 3A state tournament.
“I told them to be proud of themselves,” Columbia River coach Stephen Donohue said. “They did it the right way.”
The River way is to play with class, play for the logo. Donohue said this team accomplished that, and also won 21 games — the best in Donohue’s five seasons.
The Chieftains (21-4) also qualified for state the past three seasons.
“That’s a really big legacy to leave all the younger guys,” Haley said. “It’s going to be fun to come back and watch them play.”
Jace McKinney, a junior who had two hits and drove in a run against O’Dea, said the Chieftains will remember this game, but not to dwell on it.
“It will motivate us a lot,” McKinney said. “Losing here just makes us realize that we have to work even harder this summer and get there next year.”
On this day, O’Dea got the better of the baseball.
The Irish scored a run in the first, got another in second, then scored three runs on four hits in the third. Four more runs in the fourth pretty much iced the game. Whit Gilligan, O’Dea’s No. 9 hitter, went 3 for 3 with a triple and drove in five runs.
“You gotta give them a lot of credit,” Haley said. “They can smash the ball. We just had some little mistakes early that got us down. We never stopped, though.”
River got a run in the top of the third on McKinney’s run-scoring single. The Chieftains got another in the fifth when Jordan Craig came through with a two-out run-scoring single.
Columbia River added two runs in the sixth, but the rally was quashed by two highlight-reel defensive plays.
“All the stuff we’ve been doing well all year we didn’t do this game,” Donohue said. “To get to this point is super hard to do. We just ran into a good ball club.”
The Chieftains reached the quarterfinals with a 3-0 win over Mountlake Terrace earlier in the day.
Seth Rayburn threw a three-hit shutout. He retired nine in a row in one stretch.
McKinney and Haley each drove in a run with singles in the third inning and the Chieftains picked up another run in the frame on an error.
Rayburn would say after the game that the way he was feeling, he knew the game was over with that three-spot. He finished his high school pitching career with a 19-2 record.
His last victory for the Chieftains also put River into the elite eight for the 15th time in program history.
The loss that ended the season few hours later hurt the Chieftains, of course, but as Haley said, the River legacy lives on.
