After Friday night’s thrilling nine inning sudden-death championship in the Southern Section-Div. 2 final where No. 1 ranked Mission Viejo beat Chino 1-0, you wouldn’t think anything could top it.

Well, it only took 24 hours.

In another extra-inning 1-0 game, Pacifica of Garden Grove, Calif., ranked No. 9 in the latest FAB 50 ratings, outlasted M.L. King from Riverside, Calif., ranked No. 21 this week, in a marathon game that went two hours and 41 minutes and took 12 innings to complete.

It was so long that the batteries in my cell phone and my laptop died at the game.

But it was raucous, energetic classic of a championship game that softball fans will long remember, if only for two of the best pitching performances you’ll ever see.

Pacifica featured Kaylee Carson, the senior pitcher headed to North Carolina and King countered with Alabama-bound senior Alexis Osorio.

Osorio didn’t allow a hit until the ninth inning… and still lost despite striking out 16 Pacifica batters and ending the season with 357 Ks.  She was using pure heat to blow away batters and was still going strong in the top of the 10^th when she struck out the side, all on swinging third strikes.

Carlson has seemed to have improved every game and mixed up her pitches well to keep batters off balance, throwing with enough power to overpower some batters while using her drop ball to induce a number of ground balls.

The pitching was so dominant that at the end of regulation there were more errors (3) than hits (2). And both of those hits were opposite field singles by Gabby Alvarez, in the second and fourth innings.

Here’s another way to look at how the two hurlers went blow-for-blow and kept the offenses in check: before the extra innings set in, the only runners-in-scoring position were due to fielding errors followed by a sacrifice bunts.

Osorio only allowed three hits, the first being a lead off single in the top of the ninth to Mariner’s catcher Dejah Mulipola which didn’t do any damage, but the last two would prove her undoing.

In the top of the 12^th, junior infielder and Michigan commit Faith Canfield led off with a soft floating fly ball that fell into right center for a hit.  She was sacrificed to second and then scored the game’s only run on a rope to the left field fence hit by senior second baseman Brook Marquez, a Northwestern signee.

Carlson, one of the toughest and most laser focused competitors you’ll find in the high school ranks, came in the bottom of the 12^th and shut the door, although it didn’t came without a scare to Pacifica fans.

Catcher Jordan Olivarez led off with a single to right and it looked for a moment like she’d easily come home to tie the game when a line-drive blast by Gabby Alvarez, who already had two hits, curved down the first base line and landed just a foot or two in foul ground.

Alvarez would take a called third strike and one batter latter Carlson induced one of her many ground balls to end the game and give the Mariners its seventh CIF Southern Section title and first since 2007.

Overall, Carlson scattered five hits with no walks while striking out 11 in the 12-inning masterpiece, perhaps her most clutch performance in a season of impressive efforts.  She explained after the game she wasn’t concerned about the lack of offense from her Mariners’ team until the very end.

“I didn’t really worry about what we were doing,” Carlson told Carlos Arias of OCSidelines.com.  “I just wanted to pitch my game and I knew that someone would come through.”