The clock may have struck midnight — literally! — on Cinderella’s postseason baseball run, but the 2021 Lyons are already firmly entrenched in Lyon County lore.
Lyon, one of the smallest schools in the state, went toe-to-toe with No. 1-ranked Louisville Trinity for four innings Friday night in the state semifinals at Legends Field in Lexington.
However, the Shamrocks got to a tiring Jackson Shoulders for six runs in the top of the fifth inning, and went on to beat the Lyons 10-3 — stopping Lyon just one game short of playing for the state championship.
Instead, Trinity (40-2) and 1st Region champion McCracken County (35-5) will play in the KHSAA State Baseball Tournament Saturday night in Lexington at 7 p.m. Eastern time.
But the loss did little to diminish Lyon’s history-making season.
Lyon advanced farther in the postseason than any 5th District team ever has — the Lyons were just the third team from the district to win the 2nd Region championship, joining Caldwell County in 1991 and Livingston Central in 1994.
Lyon recorded its first 30-win season ever, finishing with a 30-8 mark.
The final three teams in the state came down to private powerhouse Trinity, Class 6A McCracken … and Class A Lyon.
Lyon saw a 10-game winning streak snapped in the state semifinal setback. That includes two wins in the 5th District tournament, three wins in the 2nd Region tourney, a semi-state triumph and a state quarterfinal victory over Whitley County on Thursday.
Shoulders (4-1) pitched well early, blanking Trinity for four innings before starting to run out of gas in the top of the fifth inning.
Lyon simply could not get out of the inning as the Shamrocks plated six runs to seize control of the contest.
Trinity sent 10 men to the plate in the big frame, recording five singles. The inning also included a walk and a Lyon error.
Lyon did its best to answer in the bottom of the fifth, getting three of those runs back to make it a 6-3 ballgame. Travis Yancy singled home two runs while another run came in on a 4-6-3 double play on a hard ground ball to second.,
But Trinity tacked on two runs in each of the final two innings to make it 10-3.
Shoulders was 2-for-3 at the plate for Lyon while Gunnar Bingham went 2-for-4. But the Lyons had trouble getting the key base hits against Trinity pitching that had been a staple of their earlier postseason wins.
Meanwhile, the Shamrocks recorded 14 hits in the contest. Austin Taylor was 3-for-3 with an RBI for Trinity while 2021 Kentucky Mr. Baseball Daylen Lile went 2-for-5 with a double, an RBI and two runs scored.
Lyon’s semifinal contest got underway 48 minutes late on Friday after the first semifinal between McCracken and Danville ran long. The Mustangs overcame a 7-4 deficit behind a 10-run fifth inning and went on to beat the Admirals 15-10 in a game that took 3 hours, 21 minutes.
The Lyon contest ended just 9 minutes shy of midnight in the Eastern time zone — and just ahead of storms moving into the Lexington area.
Lyon’s Shoulders and Austin Long were named to the all-state tournament team.
