With the announcement of the Little League World Series being canceled this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic, I started thinking back to 2016 when a group of kids from the middle of nowhere in New York shocked the world.

When I was a kid and played Little League in my hometown of Carbondale, I was on two championship teams and a county championship team. That last year of playing “A” ball, we were hoping to win the City-County tournament and move on with the dreams of playing in Williamsport at the Little League World Series.

We ended up beating all the other teams in the county division, but we lost to the team that represented Scranton. At that point our dreams of playing in the Little League World Series came to an end.

After moving up here to the Binghamton area and realizing that Williamsport was only about 2 hours away, I decided I wanted to go see the Little League World Series. For years I was saying I wanted  to go and I didn't care who was playing. When the Maine-Endwell team made it to the Championship Game, I knew I had to go.

Leading up to that game, went to Maine-Endwell high school to watch one of their games on the big screen live from Williamsport, and we went to NYSEG Stadium to watch another game.When they made it to the championship game we decided we would take the trip to see the game in person.

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Chris and I, along with our friends Ron and Debbie and their nephew who is visiting from New York City, drove to Williamsport to watch the game. When we first got there we picked out a spot on the top of the hill and were planning to watch the game from there.

Either Ron or Debbie said that they heard that if you go to the ticket booth, and family members who weren't using the tickets that were reserved for them turned theirs back in, there was a chance we could get them and actually sit inside the stadium. We figured it was worth a shot.

We went up to the  ticket booth and sure enough we ended up with five seats right on the third-base line. We're surrounded by a bunch of people from South Korea so we figured these were the tickets that were reserved for the families of the South Korean that weren't being used.

We were all hoping for Maine-Endwell to pull off the upset, but we weren't getting our hopes too high, especially when we saw the size of some of the kids from South Korea.

But as you already know, the boys from Broome County made us all very proud. Chris actually made it on ABC TV that day after the final out was recorded. She stood up with a sign that said “let's go M.E.” and they focused right in on her. Her phone started blowing up with people asking if she was at the game because somebody that look just like her was on TV.

It's not a very flattering shot of my wife, she's a lot more attractive in person, but yes she was on TV around the world after the game and there's a  picture to prove it.

I feel bad for all the kids who were dreaming of making it to this year's Little League World Series. According to ESPN Little League International said the events would return in 2021. That's a year too late for the kids that will be too old to play Little League next year.

[via ESPN]

Maine Endwell Little League World Series Champions

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