Austin's high school just captured the 4A championship for Colorado high school baseball. But there was much more that drove this team than normal athletics. Enjoy the Denver Post article which captures the heart of a 17 year old teammate and cancer patient....In the photographs, nobody will ever grow old.
Dads puffed chests with pride. Moms dabbed at tears pooling in the rims of sunglasses. Designated hitter Nate Jurney clutched the state championship trophy, as the Ralston Valley High Mustangs lifted him on their shoulders, saluting a teammate who refused to let cancer stop him from smacking two hits on the happiest day of his young life.
"I live in the now," Jurney said Saturday.
If now is all we're promised, then somebody grab a camera. Quick. Because right here, right now, is as good as it gets.
"I believed we could win all season," Jurney said. "But I never could picture myself holding the trophy. Until now."
Needing to beat Thomas Jefferson twice to win the double-elimination format of the Class 4A tournament, Ralston Valley produced convincing 10-0 and 8-4 victories on a spring afternoon so close to perfect it might fill scrapbooks for a lifetime.
But the moment nobody will ever forget might not look like much in a dusty scorebook 20 years down the road unless you know the whole, remarkable story of a double belted by Jurney in the second game. The way a lanky, 18-year-old senior ignored the pronounced hitch in every awkward stride as Jurney chugged to second base made teammates slap backs and shout like a band of brothers.
"Nate is a kid who has fought his butt off. And he comes up with a heroic action. Again," said senior Matt Skipper, the 6-foot-9 pitching and slugging star of this Ralston Valley team. "What (Jurney) has done is made us family, not only as a family of baseball players, but he's brought an entire community together."
The long, strange, wonderful trip that made these Mustangs state champs began with small, painful steps taken two years ago by Jurney. That's when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer that invaded his femur and required surgery to remove the malignant growth and rebuild his left knee.
After the dark-haired boy was diagnosed with a disease that strikes an estimated 400 children and adolescents in the United States each year, merely seeing Jurney pull on a baseball uniform again would have qualified as powerful stuff.
Sure enough, there he was, wearing No. 17 in the dugout, when the odds were stacked against the Mustangs and they needed a reason to believe anything is possible against Thomas Jefferson, which owned a six-game winning streak in recent seasons against Ralston Valley.
"I just want to play baseball," said Jurney, whose cancer has yet to be defeated after it spread to his lungs eight months ago. But he decided, with the blessing of parents and a doctor, to combat the new tumors with laser treatments rather than more invasive surgery that would have ended his athletic comeback.
But know where truth exceeds fiction any screenwriter in Hollywood could imagine? Jurney has proved to be far more than an inspirational good-luck charm for Ralston Valley. The dude can hit.
In the most crucial game of the season, Jurney batted eighth in the Mustangs' lineup during the title-clinching victory, and ripped a wicked single on top of his gutsy, refuse-to-surrender double.
"I pray that the next scan of my lungs doesn't show any growth in the tumors. My doctor says I will eventually need an operation. But there's no date set for it," Jurney said.
"Life's never been better than now. This is awesome. Really emotional. Tears? Only tears of joy."
"I can see us as friends 20 years from now. I can see us being together until we die. And then when we die, we'll go to each other's funerals," said Skipper, the big first baseman. "This is a lifelong friendship that we've bonded. This day lasts for the rest of our lives. The grass will always be green, and nobody can ever take the feeling away from us."
With a dream in his pocket and eyes full of hope, Jurney walked off the green grass of All-City Field in a line of rowdy Mustangs through a gate swung wide
