What now?

WHAT’S CAUSING ALL THIS?MITCH LUCAS

Hey, Jude...

Don’t make it bad;

Take a sad song

and make it better...

Those words sang by the Beatles blared out of my stereo on the way to work this morning and comforted me a little bit after watching Kilgore get shelled last night by Brenham, 11-2.

Hey, everyone has a bad game sometime — the sad song. All those New York Yankees teams from the 1950’s? Nobody remembers the games they lost. They remember the World Series wins.

How many bad plays do you remember Michael Jordan making? I remember the good ones, personally.

Anyway, Thursday’s scenario could have been worse — that could have been Game 3, or a one-game series, and KHS could be out of the playoffs.

Something tells me the return trip to Woodville on Saturday will read a little differently.

Brenham’s Cubs proved they can hit the ball, and Kilgore had by far its worst game defensively in quite some time. The combination was the Game 1 loss with a final score that looked much worse than the game, I assure you.

But KHS coach Tim Harkrider was upbeat when I spoke to him this morning (you can read some of the things he told me in the game story above) and he and the KHS players are looking at the Game 1 loss as a learning experience. The series, he vowed, isn’t over, and although Brenham has a storied baseball program — 22 playoff appearances in a row — Kilgore won’t just fade away.

I would have expected no less. Harkrider is a true baseball man — he’s breathed diamond dirt his entire life, coming from a coach’s family and up through a successfull high school, college and pro career. He realizes that his team still has a chance. It won’t be easy to beat Brenham twice on Saturday. But if Kilgore’s dream of playing in Austin is to be realized, that’s the cards the Bulldogs have been dealt.

Obviously, Brenham’s coaching staff realizes they dodged a bit of a bullet by defeating Kilgore’s Casey Whitmer. The Cubs will have to face Pat McCrory in Game 2.

Now, the pressure is, without question, all on Kilgore — but McCrory has thrived in this position his entire high school career. Things could happen. Should KHS return to Woodville and defeat Brenham in Game 2, then Game 3 could be a wild ride, indeed.

The true pressure might be on the KHS lineup. Four hits against a capable group of Brenham pitchers was not enough to get the job done Thursday night — far from it.

I’ve never been known for glossing things over, and here’s reality — at times this season, Kilgore has gone through hitting slumps. At times, Kilgore’s pitching has overwhelmed opponents so, the Bulldogs were able to get three, four hits a game and win. That doesn’t appear to be the case with this series. Most likely, if the Bulldogs don’t hit the ball Saturday, their season will end.

Kilgore must come through at the plate and rattle the Brenham pitching staff, rattle their defense much like KHS looked somewhat rattled in the top of the fourth inning Thursday night.

In Game 1, the Cubs were able to get the ball into spots that Kilgore defenders had a hard time getting to — that’s what baseball is all about.

Give Brenham credit. Its players hit well; they combined that with good defense and good pitching, and the recipe became the main course, the Game 1 victory. I would, however, have liked to have seen them win with a little more class; I thought doing the funky chicken in front of the dugout in the bottom of the fifth inning of Game 1 of a best-of-three-game playoff series was the textbook definition of celebrating too early.

But maybe they did have something to celebrate. After all, they defeated a KHS team with as strong a one-two pitching punch as anyone, and there might have even been a little football revenge going on — Kilgore did embarass Brenham in the 4A football playoffs.

At any rate, Game 1 is, just as Harkrider said, a memory. It will be up to the young men on the baseball team to determine if that will be motivation — or the first of two losses that ended a very promising baseball season before it should have ended.

I’ve been around this community long enough to know that the guys on the baseball team have too much heart to ride off in the sunset with a bad performance. I fully expect Brenham to have all it can handle Saturday afternoon.

We’ll see if I’m right.

• A little housecleaning: In my story that ran Tuesday about the KHS softball team, I listed the roster, and accidentally left out Brittany Gary, a freshman.

Brittany, I apologize; you and your teammates had a fine season.

See you all in Woodville on Saturday.