Peach lasted exactly one out. At a ballpark where the thwomps in the outfield are supposed to swat home runs out of the sky and keep the scoreboard honest, Boo's Dinger Brigade instead treated Bowser Castle like a batting cage with a chandelier, and by the time the first inning was folded up and put away, they had hung eight runs on the board and effectively decided a playoff game before most of the crowd had found their seats. The ledger on Peach is not for the squeamish: one-third of an inning, eight earned runs, six hits, an earned run average that reads 216.00 and looks less like a stat than a typo. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough spent the rest of the afternoon trying to un-ring that bell, and to their credit they very nearly did. Green Noki came out of the bullpen and threw the best baseball anybody managed all day — 4.1 innings, a single earned run — but a reliever who pitches beautifully after his team already trails 8-0 is a man mopping a floor that is still flooding. Because here is the strange part: this was not a laugher. It was a 51-hit brawl, 26 knocks for Chatter's crew, 25 for Love's, and for long stretches the deficit meant nothing. Luigi's Had Enough answered with a six-spot of their own in the fifth and tacked on four more in the seventh, and the reason they got that close has a name — or several. Wario went 5-for-6 and refused to make outs. Purple Toad — Poad to the regulars in this press box — drove in three. Luigi added four hits. They kept the door open all afternoon. What swung it shut was King Boo, and not in the way he swung a Season 1 semifinal shut with a grand slam. Love handed him the ball in relief and King Boo promptly gave back nine earned runs on fourteen hits across 3.2 innings, a 22.09 ERA that turned a comfortable lead into a white-knuckle ninth. It says something about how lopsided that first inning was that a pitcher can be that combustible and still be standing on the winning side. The bats bailed him out. Hammer Bro, the reigning Season 2 MVP, went 4-for-6 and knocked in five, doing exactly the kind of load-bearing work that earns the title. Blue Magikoopa matched him with four hits of his own. And Daisy took Game MVP honors — three hits, an RBI, and 5.1 serviceable innings on the mound before the bullpen adventure began. Even Toadsworth, muscle relaxers and all, chipped in three hits; the man who owns this league's single-game record of six knows his way around a hit column. So Love's Brigade advance out of round one, 15-12, a game that finished with 27 combined runs and enough hits to bury a scorekeeper. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough leave 6-4, undone by a single inning they were never allowed to forget. In a park built to smother offense, both dugouts found a way to score twelve and fifteen anyway — which tells you the thwomps had the afternoon off. — Inky the Blooper