Column by Rick S. Alvord

The Associated Press

They wanted it.

They wanted it like a baby wants to attack his first birthday cake with his bare hands.

They wanted it like a little boy wants to rip open his presents on Christmas morning.

But this is baseball. Wanting it will only take a team so far.

“They wanted to win so bad,” said veteran Lower Columbia College skipper Kelly Smith, shortly after his young Red Devils blew a ninth-inning lead against Clackamas and made an early exit from the NWAACC Tournament on Friday at David Story Field.

“When you’re young and inexperienced in these situations, the way most of this group is, you have a little bit of that deer-in-the-headlights thing going,” he said. “They had a heavy burden on them. That LCC mystique is there. It’s like, ‘LCC is out in two? What the heck?’ But that’s part of the expectations here. That’s why they want to play here, because there is that expectation of doing something good at the end of the season.”

Smith said he typically transforms into “Joe Positive” for the NWAACC tourney after spending most of the regular season “yelling and screaming.”

“Maybe that was a shock to their system, seeing me be Joe Positive. Maybe they thought I was sick or something,” he joked. “There were no big speeches to make. Just go out and compete, let them play the game.

“It just didn’t turn out. We didn’t handle it well. It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, we might lose.’ You could see it,” Smith added. “You can’t do that here, in this tournament.”

The Red Devils can look back on an exceptional campaign that saw them finish 35-8 overall and capture another NWAACC Western Division title.

With this group, so young and so talented, that’s an impressive feat.

But on the championship stage, with the best in the Northwest assembled for five days of big-boy baseball, the Devils displayed their youth.

On Thursday, LCC trailed powerful Skagit Valley 4-0 before chopping the deficit in half with two runs in the eighth inning.

The bullpen promptly gave up six runs in the top of the ninth.

On Friday, Western Division MVP Eric Lane — one of 17 freshmen on LCC’s 24-man playoff roster — put the Red Devils ahead 5-4 in the bottom of the eighth with an opposite-field base hit to right field.

“Outer half of the plate,” Lane said. “I just went with it.”

And so Smith called on closer Levi Dean, a freshman from Chehalis, to slam the door on Clackamas and prolong LCC’s season.

Dean got ahead of leadoff batter Isaiah Ferrer 1-2 in the count, then came back with a breaking pitch on the inside corner that Ferrer dipped and leaned into for a hit-by-pitch free pass. Smith protested, but the plate umpire didn’t change his mind.

Horrible call. And it was a bad break that led to a horrible conclusion for the Devils.

Dean whiffed the next batter, issued a four-pitch walk and allowed an infield single on a high chopper that landed in no-man’s land. With the sacks full, Johnny Wade fought off a series of two-strike offerings from the hard-throwing Dean before lacing a single to left to make it 5-5.

David Greenstein then lofted a two-run double just inside the left-field line to give the pesky Cougars the lead.

It was Dean’s first blown save of the season. LCC went down quietly in the bottom of the ninth.

Lane said he couldn’t have conjured up a better situation for the Devils — ahead by a run, the home crowd smiling, their lights-out closer strolling to the hill.

“Any time, definitely. I’d take my chances with Levi out there any time,” said Lane, a second baseman from Port Angeles. “He’s a great competitor. We all have confidence in him. But that’s baseball. Things happen sometimes.”

Lane said he can’t wait to get back to work next season for the Red Devils, who will boast a plethora of sophomores in the program and a strong incoming freshman class in 2010.

But the sting of this season’s surprising NWAACC departure undoubtedly will linger throughout the summer.

“It hurts. But I think this really sparked the fire for the freshmen,” he said. “It was a good experience. But next year we want it to end a lot differently. We wanted to show that we were a good team right here, right now. I think we’re a better team than we showed. We just had a bad couple of games.”

Smith, the grizzled veteran who has won four NWAACC titles at LCC, is excited about what’s on the horizon for his program.

But he’s not about to forget what his green 2009 squad accomplished — even if it didn’t include a happy ending.

“The success this group had, it was beyond expectations,” he said. “We didn’t have many sophomores, but for the guys who spent two years here with me, I am going to miss ’em. For them, it’s probably like getting out of jail — a time of cleansing. For the rest of ’em, for all these young guys, they’ll be coming back to my jail again next season.”

Consider them volunteer prisoners, Coach.

“Personally, I can’t wait to get back,” Lane said. “We want to show the community and the league what we can do. We’ll learn from this and come back hungry.”