Saugus plays tonight for the US Little League Championship. If they win, they play tomorrow for the Little League World Series Championship.
I got my fingers crossed and will be watching the game…
Route 1, which makes up Saugus’s floodlit spine, has drawn streams of residents from all over town on game nights, where they pile into the warehouse-sized restaurants and cheer on the boys. They come from the old east side, where the now-famous Little League team hails from, and the tonier developments of the west side. Five hundred people gathered around televisions at Prince Pizzeria & Bar, 400 mobbed the upstairs at the Frank Guiffrida’s Hilltop Steak House, and 200 watched at Kowloon restaurant. By the improbable end of the game, when Saugus rallied with four runs to beat Richmond, Texas, by a single run in extra innings, old ladies were hoarse.
“I almost had a heart attack,” said Chris Moore, who is 12. “I ran outside my house and started yelling, `Honk for Saugus.’ It was crazy. I almost died.”
After the game, 2,000 honking, waving fans poured into the town’s central square, said Saugus Police Lieutenant Mike Annese. Yesterday, in the crowd’s wake, a bronze Union soldier was decorated with a baseball glove, a Little League poster and a jersey in team colors. The crowd’s energy “burst” almost as soon as it gathered, Annese said.
“They were happy to the point where they wanted to be with someone other than themselves,” he said. [Boston Globe]