COURTICE — If you enjoy suspense, the Courtice Cows are not for you. They scored two in the first, two in the second and two in the third, which is less a baseball game than a municipal water bill. Meanwhile the Enniskillen Donkeys put up four, four and four, and the final was 12-6, and somewhere a Cows fan is explaining to you that the score was "closer than it looked." It wasn't. It looked exactly like it was.

Chris went 6-for-7. Six hits. In a three-inning game. No strikeouts, no home runs, just a man relentlessly finding grass like a lawn sprinkler. Austin was 5-for-7 with two of them over the fence, because the Donkeys apparently believe in both volume and spectacle.

"We just took what the pitching gave us," said Austin, who took considerably more than that and left the premises with it.

The Donkeys are 5-1 with three straight, and the only blemish remains that 3-1 loss to the Beavers on Sept. 23, a game Enniskillen partisans now describe the way the Red Sox used to describe 1986 — unfortunate, inexplicable, best not discussed at dinner.

For Courtice, this was the end of the good feeling. Last Wednesday they beat the Beavers 5-4 and you could hear the parade route being measured. Now they're 2-4 and riding a loss, which for the Cows counts as a return to form. Derek was 2-for-6 with a home run. Lee was 3-for-6 with a home run and the game's only strikeout, a stat line that in Courtice qualifies for a plaque.

"I thought we matched them pretty much pitch for pitch," said Lee, who did not match them pitch for pitch, or run for run, or inning for inning.

The Cows have now scored five, eight, eight, five and six in recent outings, which is a perfectly respectable amount of offence against teams that are not the Donkeys. Enniskillen has outscored Courtice 17-6 across their meetings this season.

The standings are not a conspiracy. They're just arithmetic, and the Cows keep showing their work.