Three innings. Seventeen runs. Six home runs.

The yard has never seen anything like it. The yard may never recover.

Tyrone 9, Courtice 8. Write it down. Frame it. Explain it to your grandchildren when they ask what you were doing on the sixteenth of September.

It began in violence. Four runs for the Turkeys in the first. Four back from the Cows in the same breath. Neither side blinked. Neither side could afford to.

Then came the barrage.

Dan, of the Turkeys, hit three home runs. Three. In six at-bats. A man rewriting the ceiling of what is possible in a backyard.

And then Lee, of the Cows, matched him. Three of his own. Five hits in six trips. A five-hit night in a three-inning game is not a stat line, it is a weather event.

Six home runs between two men. The combined tonnage is still being assessed.

Dean added four hits and a homer. RyanP added four hits and a homer. The Turkeys did not so much win as survive.

"Every swing tonight, I was swinging for the fence, for the standings, for everything," said RyanP, who was asked whether it was warm out and said yes.

The Cows' third inning was the last stand. Four runs. The tying run alive. The go-ahead run breathing. And then it was over, and it was not enough, and it never is.

John went 1-for-7 with four strikeouts.

"Four times I walked back and four times I told myself the next one belongs to me," said John, who said nothing at all and got a drink of water.

The Cows fall to 0-2. Two losses in a season that is two games old, a hole so deep that geologists have been notified. The Turkeys climb to 1-1, even with the Beavers, chasing the undefeated Donkeys, who sit at 2-0 and who beat these same Cows 5-0 earlier in the very same evening.

Yes. The Cows played twice. The Cows were shut out once and lost a nine-eight classic once.

Legacies were made Wednesday. Legacies were unmade. And Dan and Lee, opposites in uniform, are forever linked by three swings apiece.