sports CORRESPONDENT

This team that finished 8-12 for the regular season, the Evergreen and Tyee high schools combined Junior Legion team, came through the postseason with so much more left to show the others that beat them so badly. They left many games figuratively holding the slipper past the stroke of midnight getting into the pumpkin stagecoach.

"It's a Cinderella story," said coach Rick Solomon.

After barely making the playoffs, being the last team from the league to get in to districts, they went and won many games including beating teams that clobbered them during the regular season.

"I guess you could say we peaked at the right time," said Solomon, who coaches along with Tony Stockman, Tony Hetler, Doug Stultz and manager Dave Olson, who also coaches Evergreen's high school team.

The game that really changed things around for this junior legion team of local boys 16 and 17 years old mostly was the very first game of the playoffs, a loss. But, thankfully, districts was double elimination.

And that loss showed so much to these boys that it was almost a win. Notably, they lost during the season to Kent twice, whom they played to open districts July 21. They lost both those games to Kent during the season, badly, 18-0 and 7-1.

"We lost 1-0 on an unearned run," said Solomon of that district opener.

Kyle Malmstrom, a Tyee player, pitched that game and watched that one error change everything.

"I knew we were going to lose when that error was committed," said Malmstrom.

But he knew something else too. They had just barely lost to a team that had destroyed them twice during the regular season.

"I addressed my teammates that we had lost but I said something like, 'Hey, we could have done better.' It was just one little mistake. If we can eliminate that mistake, we can beat anybody."

What happened next as this team faced elimination game after game after game is that they won, won, won and won again.

"We lost to Kent and then we won four in a row against teams that had clobbered us during the season."

This team on July 22 beat Federal Way, 12-6, a team that beat them 11-1 and 7-4 during the season. Then they beat Lakeside, 12-11, after having been beaten and bloodied, 15-1, during the season by them. Then, they played Kent on July 23 a little later in the day after the thriller over Lakeside. Kent was no match, getting humbled, 14-6.

Then it was time for this team to play the first-place team of the regular season, Enumclaw.

This team won, 12-5.

"We bunted on them close to a dozen times, almost all for either sacrifices or to advance runners," said Solomon. "Enumclaw was another of the teams that had 10-runned us during the season."

In the second game, they played a second game because Enumclaw had not lost yet. Enumclaw won, 16-5.

"We were out of gas," said Solomon.

"We even beat the first place team one time, but we couldn't pull off a second game," said Malmstrom, a senior-to-be at Tyee and the ace of the staff for this team. He was 2-1 in districts and won the one state game.

This team went to state and lost the first game to the host team, Centralia, 5-1. Josh Wells, an Evergreen player, hit a home run late after Centralia already led, 5-0.

"That loss didn't bother us too much because we played really well," said Solomon.