Crushing end for Mary Louis

Mary Louis’s eight seniors knew their high school softball careers would eventually end sometime this spring. They just had no inkling it would be so early in such devastating fashion.
The Hilltoppers coughed up leads of 5-2 and 7-5 in the final two frames and lost to Bishop Kearney, 8-7, in eight innings on Kristen O’Neill’s two-out, two-strike, two-run single off Gina Loriggio in the Brooklyn/Queens Diocesan quarterfinals at Gil Hodges Field in Brooklyn Tuesday afternoon.
Mary Louis was coasting much of the way. They held a 5-2 lead behind right-hander Lisa Scheer heading into the bottom of the seventh inning. But the Hilltoppers came undone.
O’Neill’s two-run double, just out of the reach of center fielder Jillian Zic, made it 5-4. Scheer appeared to regain her composure after registering the second out of the inning on a weak line drive to shortstop. But she was touched up for the game-tying single to center. Mary Louis, however, scratched out two runs in the eighth off Cecilia Ethridge, taking advantage of two errors. Mary Louis Manager Ginny Peiser called upon Loriggio to close it out and she retired the first two batters she faced.
Then, in quick succession, the next three Tigers reached, on a single, a walk and a third-strike wild pitch that bounced to the backstop, producing Bishop Kearney’s sixth run. Up stepped up O’Neill, who ripped an 0-2 delivery up the middle for the game-winning runs, ending what the Hilltoppers had hoped would be a lengthy postseason run.
“That was how our season went,” Peiser said. “We take a lead, kind of relax, and let the other teams get back into the game every single time. This is a hard lesson to learn.”
Expectations were high for the Jamaica Estates school at the season’s outset. They returned almost their entire team, and figured a trip to the championship was a realistic goal. Granted, they lost all six meetings with the borough’s elite - St. Francis Prep and Archbishop Molloy - but the playoffs were their time for revenge.
“It’s my senior year, I really didn’t want it to end like this,” said senior first baseman Megan White, wiping tears from her eyes. “I meant to come back and show Prep and Molloy we were here to compete.”
Perhaps, White, who had two hits and an RBI, said, that was their undoing. They were looking ahead in the late innings to a rematch with Molloy, the defending Brooklyn/Queens champions, instead of the task. “We felt,” White said, “like we had it.”
But, she quickly added, building more of a cushion would’ve helped, too. As Peiser noted, the Hilltoppers often let leads get away, with errors and mental mistakes, and by not adding on enough runs. Either way, their season is over.
“I didn’t even know what to say to them,” Peiser said. “It’s really hard. Life is cruel.”