By Brad Hallier
WICHITA – When you win a championship, it’s natural to assume you’ll win another.
It’s also – unfairly – forgotten how stinking hard it is to win a championship.
It took the Kansas City Chiefs 50 years to win a second Super Bowl. And since Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, Chris Jones and Travis Kelce led the Chiefs to victory in Super Bowl 54, it was expected that the Chiefs were going to keep winning Super Bowls.
And they have. The Chiefs are back-to-back Super Bowl champions headed to this season and are a strong favorite to be the first NFL franchise to win three straight Super Bowls.
But Chiefs fans can also forget that Mahomes won “only” one Super Bowl in his first four seasons. It’s hard just to get to a Super Bowl. You have to win two or three straight games against top competition. Luck is a factor too. It all has to come together at the right time.
Randy Dreiling made it look easy during his uber-successful 17-year run as Hutchinson High football coach, building the greatest dynasty in Kansas football history with six consecutive state titles from 2004-2009 and winning seven titles in eight years.
It only looked easy, and I’m sure Salthawk fans thought the dynasty would continue for 50 years.
When the Hutchinson Monarchs won their first NBC World Series championship last year, it almost seemed easy. They won all six games by an average of more than seven runs a game. They beat NBC beast Santa Barbara 6-3 in the championship game, and even that appeared easy. The Monarchs controlled the entire game, and it seemed just a formality when closer Reed Scott pitched the ninth inning.
This season, the Monarchs returned to the NBC World Series as the defending champion. They had a great regular season but only eked their way into bracket play with a 1-2 record pool play record.
But then, the Monarchs clobbered the Liberal BeeJays, eliminated Santa Barbara again, and edged Jayhawk Collegiate League rival Kansas Cannons to advance to the championship game at Wichita State’s Eck Stadium against the Hays Larks.
For seven innings, it felt like the Monarchs were going to repeat. Camden Johnson, Jaden Gustafson and Will Edmunson drove in second-inning runs as the Monarchs led 3-0.
They still led 3-2 in the eighth inning but had squandered several opportunities to build on that lead. You just felt if they could get to the ninth inning with the lead, Scott again would close it out, the Monarchs would storm out of the dugout and a second championship trophy would be in owners Marc and Kim Blackims hands.
It didn’t happen. Hays scored twice in the eighth inning and three in the ninth to win 7-3.
Do you need more proof of how hard it is to win a championship? This was the first title for the Larks.
Long-time Larks coach Frank Leo probably wondered if he’d ever win the NBC World Series. The Larks had been runner-up six previous times, including five this century.
I don’t think the Saturday loss is what hurts the most. It’s watching the opponent celebrate the championship that sticks with you. Yes, the Monarchs will rue the 13 runners left on base as the biggest problem Saturday. But knowing how close they were to another championship and seeing it taken away, and then seeing the Larks celebrate just as the Monarchs had done a year before stung.
But this championship loss doesn’t take away from the season the Monarchs had. They went 31-10, won the Jayhawk Collegiate League and played on the final day possible. And again, they represented the community well. The Monarchs are often at community events, they participate in autograph sessions, they hang out with fans after home games, talk to kids and pose for pictures.
That’s why these kinds of losses hurt. The Monarchs are Hutchinson’s team for about 12 weeks every summer. And they rarely disappoint. Fans connect with the team and vice versa.
The players, coaches and the Blackims will sit and kind of stare into the abyss for the next few days. They’ll watch TV without really watching it. They’ll have conversations but not really participate in them.
Losing hurts. It sucks. What’s more, we don’t know when or if the Monarchs will play for the NBC World Series championship again.
But they won’t stop representing this city with first-class people and championship-caliber players. That’s as valuable of an asset as last year’s NBC championship trophy and this year’s runner-up trophy.
Thank you Monarchs for another great season. Let’s do it again in nine months.
