For six innings at Wario Palace, the scoreboard read like an unpaid electric bill — zeros in every window and nobody home. Then the seventh arrived, and both dugouts seemed to remember at the same instant that runs were legal in this league. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms cracked it open first, hanging a five-spot in the bottom of the seventh off Diddy Kong, who had until that point been dealing shadows. It was a startling reversal for the same Diddy Kong who a week ago walked out of Mario Stadium having blanked the Weed Sox. Here he was hunted down for seventeen hits over 7.1 innings, five of them earned, most of them arriving in one merciless frame. When a pitcher surrenders seventeen knocks and still only trails 5-1, you know his defense was catching lightning behind him — but lightning eventually runs out of the sky. Granbel's Jane Goodall's Nightmare refused to let the ledger close there. A single run in the seventh, a three-run answer in the eighth, and one more in the ninth pulled the visitors level at five, forcing the whole thing into extra innings and setting up the strangest stat line of the young season. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms pounded out twenty-two hits on the afternoon — twenty-two! — and squeezed exactly six runs from them. Green Toad went 4-for-6, Black Shy Guy 4-for-5, Yellow Toad 2-for-6 with a pair of driven in, and still the Mushrooms spent most of the day leaving traffic stranded on the base paths like abandoned go-karts. Somewhere Zeph, who has long petitioned the baseball gods for Toad home runs, watched his Toads collect base hit after base hit and wondered why none of them cleared a wall. The man who dragged this thing across the finish line was Yellow Magikoopa, and he did it the old-fashioned way: by refusing to leave. Eleven full innings, six strikeouts, five earned runs, and a single RBI of his own for good measure — a complete-game marathon that earned him MVP honors and, one assumes, a very long soak afterward. When Birdo's finally pushed across the sixth run to walk off with a 6-5 win in the eleventh, it was Magikoopa's arm that had bought the time to get there. The result keeps the Mushrooms perfect at 3-0 and alone atop the Season 2 board at 28 runs for and just six against. The Nightmare fall to 2-1 but stay comfortably in second — a good club that ran into a better afternoon, and a bullpen note worth keeping: Green Shy Guy tossed three scoreless in relief and allowed nothing while everything around him burned. Some heroes just don't get the box score they deserve. Blooper's Final Ink: twenty-two hits and six runs is not a scoring line, it's a cautionary tale. The Mushrooms won anyway. That is the sort of thing perfect teams do. — Inky the Blooper