King Boo did not so much win a playoff game Sunday as file it in both departments. He drove in three runs, he cleared the fence once, and then — as if bored with only half a box score — he walked to the mound and threw 5.2 innings of shutout relief. When one player is your MVP with a bat and your reason for a lead with an arm, the opposing dugout is not losing a series. It is being audited. The scene was Yoshi Park, a yard this paper stopped calling anything but Dinger Park a while ago, and for a few innings it looked like it might behave. Nothing crossed for three frames. Then the fourth arrived and both sides remembered why they came. Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough pushed across three, the only runs Peach's afternoon would earn her, and for a heartbeat the visitors were level with the moment. Boo's Dinger Brigade answered in the bottom half with four, and that one-run swing was, in retrospect, the whole ballgame written small. The cruelty was in the hit column. Boo's Brigade rapped out twenty-one hits; Luigi's Had Enough managed a perfectly respectable thirteen and had almost nothing to show for them. Peach wore most of it — 7.1 innings, eighteen hits allowed, eight earned runs, and exactly one strikeout to keep her company. That is not a start so much as a hostage situation. Waluigi got two-thirds of an inning of mop duty and surrendered three more hits for his trouble. Behind her, the bats did what they could. Purple Toad — Poad to those of us who file these things — went 2-for-4 with a pair of driven in, and Green Magikoopa and Waluigi each collected a couple of knocks, but thirteen hits and three runs is the arithmetic of a team that kept reaching base and kept getting stranded there. Meanwhile Blue Magikoopa was busy going 5-for-5, which is the kind of night that gets a fellow randomly tested on the walk back to the clubhouse. Hammer Bro, the reigning face of Season 2, chipped in a 4-for-4 of his own. But the story kept circling back to King Boo, who has a habit of authoring these October moments — Brigade fans need only recall his grand slam that closed out a semifinal a season ago. Sunday he traded the walk-off theater for something colder: three RBI, a home run, and 5.2 innings without a single earned run after Daisy's short outing left the game hanging at 3.1. He struck out three. He allowed no ceremony. The standings tell the rest. Boo's Dinger Brigade advance out of round one and keep the season alive; Chatter's Luigi's Had Enough, 6-4 and competent all year, go home despite outhitting nobody's idea of a runaway. Somewhere up the bracket, Zeph's Birdo's Magik Mushrooms — 8-2, run differential the size of a small moon — are watching this and taking notes. But that is a story for another Sunday. This one belonged, in every column the scorekeeper keeps, to a ghost who refused to pick a lane. — Inky the Blooper