Forty-one hits is not a baseball game. It is a rummage sale, and both dugouts kept finding things they wanted. At Mushroom Palace on Sunday, Zeph's Birdo's Magik Mushrooms and Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare emptied their shelves at each other for nine innings, and when the last item was rung up the Mushrooms had come out ahead, 11-9, and punched their ticket to the next round of the Season 2 playoffs. The pitching, mercifully for the concessions vendors, was optional. Zeph's Yellow Magikoopa took the ball and took a beating — 15 hits and nine earned runs over six and a third, an ERA line (12.79) that reads like a phone number you regret giving out. Across the diamond, Granbel got even less cover: Diddy Kong lasted three and a third and surrendered eleven hits before Green Shy Guy came on to allow twelve more. When the starters are combining to give up twenty-six hits, the game stops being a duel and becomes a footrace, and the Mushrooms simply had the longer legs. They set the pace early, two in the first and three in the second to lead 5-3 before Granbel could catch a breath. The Nightmare, to their credit, refused to fold — a run in the third, a run in the fourth, a run in the fifth, a run in the sixth, the kind of steady drip that keeps a scoreboard operator honest and a manager's blood pressure interesting. Boomerang Bro, who has spent this season as the paper's designated cautionary tale, homered and drove in three, and Donkey Kong — an absentee father who at least showed up for this — went 3-for-4 with a home run and two more RBI. For a while it felt like Granbel might just out-hit the math. But the Mushrooms answered every whisper with a shout. Birdo herself was the difference-maker, and earned the game's MVP honors with three hits, three RBI, and three big plays that bailed the yellow-wearing Magikoopa out of trouble he had no business escaping. Red Magikoopa was a perfect 5-for-5 from the top of the order, a metronome in a game with no rhythm. And there was a sound Zeph has been waiting to hear all season: Red Toad, 3-for-4 with three runs batted in. Somewhere in the press box a Toad home run remains on order, but three RBI will do for a playoff afternoon. The seventh was the hinge. Zeph pushed across three more to build the cushion he would need, and it turned out he needed all of it. Granbel's Nightmare loaded up one last rally in the ninth — three runs, the tying man breathing on the doorstep — before the door closed. Credit the quiet arm: Green Toad came out of the bullpen for two and two-thirds of scoreless relief, three hits and no damage, the only pitcher on either side who looked like he'd read the scouting report. And so the top seed marches on. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms finished the regular season 8-2 with a run differential (106-33) that borders on rude, and they carry into the bracket the memory of a manager who won all of Season 1 without losing a single playoff game. Granbel's Nightmare, 5-5 and a fourth seed, went down swinging — eighteen hits is not the profile of a team that quit. It is the profile of a team that ran into a buzzsaw wearing a bow. — Inky the Blooper