It was the baseball championship that lasted two days.

No, I’m not exaggerating.

Shelby Academy and Lowndes Academy tee’d it up in the finals of the Class A Final Four tournament.

The first pitch of the game was thrown out at 7:30 p,m., on Friday night.

At 12:24 a.m., Shelby’s Cody Wright roped a single pushing a pair of runs across the plate, making the score a candidate for the mercy rule at 14-4.

That’s great and all, but Shelby was the guest team and the bottom half of the inning was still yet to be played.

The final out of the second game was recorded at 12:49 a.m., Saturday morning when Shelby’s Josh Kervin fired an offspeed pitch to a befuddled Rebel batter.

The result was a strikeout and a merciful ending to the game in which Shelby won it’s first state championship in a bunch of years.

Wow, do you realize that you could have watched Titanic twice or the first half of a Chip Ellis car commercial and still made it back for the end of the game.

That’s how epic this game was.

Granted, the scores could have been better, Lowndes did their best impression of the New York Yankees by giving up seven runs in the first and then 17 runs in the second game, with that statistic withstanding, these two teams left it all on the field.

Games like Friday’s championship serve as examples of teams who premier in their league and who has some of the kids that are willing to work hard and be successful.

But, you saw that all throughout the tournament.

From Tuesday to the finish on Saturday afternoon there were no slouch teams competing.

Glenwood, who won the AAA Championship, proved that as tough as they were that they could be beaten. Morgan Academy showed that even eventual state champions can be knocked around as they did the best they could to put the Gators on the ropes, forcing them to win the game in the bottom half of the seventh inning. No other team scored a run on Glenwood from that game out.

In AA, Escambia came into the tournament and dropped the first game and in the elimination game came within a run of putting Clarke out of the tournament. These two teams were no strangers though, Clarke beat Escambia in the regular season to win the regional championship. When both teams made it to the tournament, they had to be separated. In their meeting at Meadowview’s field, where Escambia ended the Trojans season, a coaching blunder could have ended up hurting them. With a runner rounding third, stumbling and bumbling, he stumbled into Escambia’s coach, resulting in the runner to be called out and effectively killing the Cougars momentum.

With things like that aside, the tournament was a well-run affair everything moved like clockwork and it’s going to be exciting to see how many of these teams can make it back here next year.

But, with the end of the baseball tournament means one thing.

It’s three weeks until the official start of summer workouts for football season. It’s going to be interesting to see if any of the rivalries that were started on the diamond can carry over to gridiron. My vote is that they will.

It’s that simple.