Barbee's World: NWAC History? 'I like that'

College Softball – LCC becomes first team to finish season as undefeated champions

LCC softball players soak head coach Traci Fuller with the water bucket following a 9-1 win over Everett in the NWAC Championship game, Sunday, May 18, at Delta Park in Portland. The Red Devils became the first team in history to finish the season undefeated. / Photos courtesy of LCC Athletics

Sam Barbee for Blast Zone Media / blastzonenews@gmail.com

College Softball

PORTLAND — Do I really need to say it? I feel like the meme when Bart Simpson is in the classroom and everybody wants him to say the thing, so he says the thing and everyone goes crazy. Meanwhile Bart is embarrassed that the thing he’s said has now become mockable.

Lower Columbia’s softball team went undefeated. There. I said it. Can we move on? No? Okay, fine.

Forty-eight wins. Zero losses. Unreal.

Like, actually unbelievable. I didn’t know how to start any interviews Sunday afternoon after they won. It was a whole buncha “What Earths” and “How the Hecks.” I may have used the word gobsmacked at some point. I still can’t wrap my head around it.

Lower Columbia College is home to the first team to ever go undefeated on the way to an NWAC Championship.

It’s like when there’s a new scientific discovery that flips established knowledge on its head. The person who made the discovery can understand conceptually what is happening. Their depth of knowledge allows them to puzzle out whatever is going on.

But it shouldn’t happen. It doesn’t make sense. And regular folks have no idea of making sense of it. Every rule they thought they knew doesn’t hold, and apparently there are new rules. Or maybe the conditions of the situation allow for this one remarkable thing to happen and recreating it is the challenge. So, to borrow a phrase fro myself, “What on Earth?”

How does this happen?

I spent my time today not asking about the game — it was boring and a formality — but instead how does this all happen? Nobody knows for sure. This feels pretty unknowable, in the same way it’s unknowable what’s on Kepler-22b without your own spaceship a few lightyears to spend studying the subject up close.

But the Red Devils tried. They thought. They did their best, and they came up with some good stuff. But it’s all just guess work. Because the planets aligned perfectly for LCC, and this pattern in the sky will likely never be replicated.

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