Great Catches and DeMilio’s Homers Gave Vikings A Day to Savor

For three consecutive years, the softball season had come to the same disappointing conclusion for the Valhalla Vikings —  a first-round defeat in the state tournament at the hands of Section 9’s Rhinebeck just days after winning the Section 1 championship.

But last Tuesday afternoon, the Vikings, fresh off a fourth successive sectional title and with a different opponent awaiting them, finally got the chance to make some noise themselves in the state tourney.

With Maddy DeMilio belting a home run leading off the third inning and freshman pitcher Sydni Holtz working her way out of one late-inning jam after another, the Vikings managed to get past Highland, the Section 9, Class B champion, 3-1 in the first round of regional playoffs. Then, with a berth in the state’s final four up for grabs, the Vikings came right back later in the day and defeated Section 11’s Babylon 8-6 in the regional final.

DeMilio delivered her second homer of the afternoon and center fielder Jade Fumarelli made two game-changing catches as Valhalla, ironically playing on the home field in Rhinebeck of the very school that had dashed its state-title dreams three years running, held on to beat the Long Island champions.

Babylon, undefeated this season before facing the Vikings, battled back from an early 5-0 deficit and had the tying runs in scoring position in the bottom of the seventh inning when Brianna Goodfellow’s long drive to left field was hauled in by Danielle Maffei just in front of the fence for the final out. Maffei’s running catch put an exclamation point on one of the most dramatic and thrilling days in the team’s history.

“I thought that was over her head and was gonna go for a three-run, inside-the-parker or a tying triple and she tracked it down,” said a relieved Vikings coach, John Hayes, of the ball hit by Goodfellow. “Danielle Maffei, with two runners on, a shot in the gap, drop-stepping and tracking that down. Unbelievable.”

DeMilio, the Viking catcher who had led off the game by depositing Babylon ace  Tiana Guiliano’s third pitch over the fence down the left-field line, looked on in horror from behind the plate as the Panthers’ Goodfellow made solid contact and nearly ended the Vikings’ season.

“Oh dear, she better catch this ball,” DeMilio admitted thinking to herself as she watched her teammate give chase way out in left. “And sure enough, she did, thank God.”

As impressive as Maffei’s catch was, it was overshadowed by a pair of dazzling grabs a bit earlier in deep center field by Fumarelli, who also cut down a Panther runner at the plate in the sixth. Babylon had already scored four times in the fourth inning to move within a run and still had two aboard when Fumarelli dashed into the gap in left-center and made a spectacular, juggling catch over the fence to rob Marisol Rivas of a home run.

“I saw it go over my head and I knew I needed to  run as fast as I could, so I just busted,” said Fumarelli, who probably sealed Babylon’s fate with her acrobatic and serendipitous play. “I just jumped in the air hoping that I would catch it and I ended up over the fence and when I fell I landed on my glove hand, the ball  popped out, but I re-caught it  in my hand and then I raised it up in the air and I saw that he (the umpire) said it was an out.”

The timely catch enabled the Vikings to hang onto their slim lead and it paved the way for their first-ever trip to the state final four up in Queensbury this past weekend, where they fell in the semifinals to Section 5’s Mynderse Academy 6-3 despite two hits apiece by DeMilio, Maffei and Fumarelli.

“Oh, you can’t make that up,” said Hayes of the storybook way his outfielders rose to the occasion. “I don’t know if we’re calling it ‘diving,’ but a ball at the fence, she timed it, took a home run away. I mean, this is major league baseball stuff.”

“That was the turning point in the game, I feel,” said Fumarelli of the heroics that kept a big inning for the Panthers from being even bigger. “We had the momentum at that point and we came in and scored some runs. That was big for us.”

The Vikings responded to Babylon’s big inning by scoring twice in their next turn at bat. With one out, Kaylie Dymek reached on an error and was driven home by Brandi Coon’s booming triple up the gap in left-center. Fumarelli followed with an RBI single and Valhalla’s lead was back up to 7-4. Another run scored in the top of the sixth when Alexa Jiminez walked and eventually came home on a sacrifice fly by Dymek.

In the bottom of the inning, Babylon collected four hits and scored twice, but a third run was cut down at the plate when Fumarelli fielded Rivas’ one-out single to center and fired a strike to the waiting DeMilio.

“Jade is just an amazing player all-around,” said DeMilio, who wasn’t bad herself over the final three games with seven hits. “She’s got an amazing arm and not many people run on her, but when they do she likes to gun them down.”

An inning later, the Vikings, feeling some nerves, made two infield errors, allowing the tying runs to get on for the Panthers.  But in between the two bobbles, Fumarelli made a sparkling catch in the gap in left-center to rob Mary Tighe of an extra-base hit. One out later, it was Maffei’s turn to  provide a standout  defensive play as she gobbled up Goodfellow’s long drive to left to end the game.

“Unbelievable,” repeated Hayes as he looked back on a special win for his team, which finished its season with a 19-5 record after starting 2-3. “They came out of the gate right away. Maddy with the solo shot just got us going. Everybody loosened up a bit. Then they started putting the ball in play. 4-, 5-0 lead and I think it was the third or fourth (inning) we started to get a little tight. We had a couple errors, a couple walks and then the heart of their lineup came up with a few big hits and all of a sudden it was a 5-4 game.

“No doubt they felt the tension,” he added. “I felt the tension. And they fought through it. This team has had to go through adversity the whole way. This was nothing different.  This is the farthest the team’s ever gone in school history and we’re gonna enjoy it.”

The Vikings exceeded anything they had ever done before by beating Highland earlier in the day. Coon’s RBI single highlighted a two-run first inning. In the third, DeMilio, who, according to Hayes, “saved her best for last,” slammed a leadoff homer over the fence in left-center to give Holtz a three-run cushion to work with. She held the Huskies scoreless until the fourth inning and stranded nine runners over the final four innings.

Holtz retired the first two Highland batters in the top of the seventh, but the Huskies soon loaded the bases with three straight singles. Jayna Parker then lined a 1-1 pitch from Holtz right at Maffei in left field to end the drama.

“There definitely has been a lot of butterflies,” said DeMilio at the conclusion of a suspense-packed afternoon for the Vikings. “We like to put ourselves up against the wall, which probably isn’t a good thing but that’s normally how we play our game.”

“I feel like we earned everything that happened this season,” added Fumarelli. “We knew we could do it. We knew we could play with any team. Every time someone went ahead of us, we fought back. We never let up. That’s just the way we play and it’s an amazing feeling.”