The following is a true story.

It was July in the year 1969. I was at Billy Byrnes’ house waiting for him in his basement to shoot pool. With a dance in his step, be bounded down the stairs.

“Hey, I got an idea,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A marathon softball game. Some kids from Texas are in the Guinness Book of records. They played for 40 hours and 15 minutes straight.”

“What are the rules?”

“You have to have 18 players with no substitutes. All 18 that start the game have to finish the game. You can’t stop the game for sleeping, but a player can lay down to rest as long as he remains in the field of play as the game continues.”

“We have to have a field with lights. There’s none around here.”

“I thought that through,” Billy said. “We can play on the field behind Quibbletown Junior High. There’s a hill that goes around the outfield. We can get fathers to park their cars up there and turn on their headlights.”

I looked at him. “The whole thing is a ridiculous idea,” I said. Let’s do it!”

We spent the next week getting 16 more kids to commit to the game. Some said no right away. Some said they wanted to play, but their parents wouldn’t let them be out over two nights, but by the end of the week, we had a full roster of two teams.

Word got out about that a bunch of kids from Piscataway, New Jersey, were going to try to break the record. A local radio station interviewed Billy and me. Poppy’s Pizza said they would contribute free pizza and soda. ShopRite offered to deliver snacks to the field.

The game was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. on Friday and we set the end time at 3 p.m. on Sunday to certify that the record would be broken. Near the starting time, panic struck me hard. We were one player short.

“Where’s Cliff?” I asked Bill. “We have to start in 10 minutes.”

“I don’t know. He said he’d be here.” Five more minutes passed. A kid about 12 years old rode his bike up to the field. I ran to him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I came to watch for a while,” he said. “I gotta be home before dark.”

“You wanna play?” We never told him it was a marathon game. Into right field he ran.

We had not discussed any strategy to conserve energy during the 43 hours of time that lay ahead of us. We played like it was a regular softball game, running the bases as fast as we could. We ate pizza, cupcakes and potato chips, and drank soda. And we used a Porta Potty that a local business had set up behind the bench.

With the headlights of cars blinding our vision, we still swung the bats with authority and chased down the balls with the speed of our young legs.

A large crowd had arrived to cheer us on, which only made us play harder and faster.

Then Karen showed up.

She was a girl from our high school. I never had the courage to ask her for a date. But here she was, and one wave to me and I was hooked. When we were up to bat, she and I chatted behind the backstop. At one moment, she put her arm around me and I had to be called back into the game when it was my team’s turn to take the field.

A police car arrived sometime after midnight.

They were looking for a missing child who was riding a green bicycle who had not returned home.

“That’s him in right field,” I said. “He can’t go home.”

Once I explained our event, the policeman smiled. “No problem. I tell his parents he’s here and he’ll come back on Sunday.”

At 2 a.m., the crowd of people went home. The 12 year old kid was asleep on the ground inside the right field foul line. Eddie threw up after eating four slices of pizza and three cupcakes. He was curled up in a fetal position inside the left field line.

The sun peeked over the outfield horizon and the cars left the premise. At 9 a.m., it was hot and humid with temperatures rising into the 90s. The jugs of water were nearly empty. We were too tired to talk. When the ball was hit, the batters walked to the base and the fielders walked to the get the ball.

At 11 a.m., Jerry D’Angelis threw a pitch, the batter swung and hit a foul ball into the woods. While I was searching for the ball, I heard Jerry shout words I still hear today.

“That’s it. I quit.”

Nobody argued with him except Bill and me. He walked past us, grabbed his car keys and just like that we were done.

Bill and I cleaned up the litter that was left behind. We began to walk home when a white station wagon pulled onto the grass behind the school. On the driver’s door were the words: “Cooperstown, New York — Hall of Fame.” He drove over to us and rolled down his window.

“Is this where the marathon softball game was supposed to be played?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “We didn’t make it. But this was softball not baseball.”

“We have a section in the Hall for softball, and if you had broken the record, we would have put a commemoration for all the kids that played the game. Sorry you didn’t break the record.”

He drove away. I said bye to Bill at his driveway and walked 2 miles to my house. I stumbled into my bedroom, where I slept until 3 p.m. Sunday, the time we would have ended our game to set a new record.

But 40 hours and 15 minutes were never to be. Our names inscribed in the Hall of Fame were never to be. When I asked Karen for a date, she was never to be.

I was 18 and playing a softball game for 15 straight hours with my high school friends, some of whom are no longer alive today.

Writing down this memory was meant to be.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com