BLOOMSBURG – Duran Porrino didn’t want his team to think about what might have been.

The Northwestern baseball coach wanted his players to remember what was the most remarkable season in program history.

One that wouldn’t be overshadowed by a 7-3 loss to Valley View in the PIAA Class 4A semifinals on Monday.

“When they broke the huddle, I said they go down as the greatest team to ever play at Northwestern Lehigh,” Porrino said after the game. “And they are. They’ve won a district title, they’ve made it to the state semis – no other team has done that.

“As freshman through juniors, they were in three straight league championship games. The bar is set really high.”

The Tigers ended a lengthy championship drought this season, winning their first district title since 1989 in dramatic fashion against Allentown Central Catholic. They also doubled their number of state playoff victories by winning two games in this year’s tournament.

“It’s awesome,” said junior Brandon Mengel. “I play tournament ball, I went to USSSA tournaments, and this has been one of the greatest times of my life. These players, they’re like brothers to me, and I’ll never forget them. This has been one of the best baseball teams I ever played with.”

Talk of what’s next has already started.

“I heard our shortstop and second basemen, Brandon Mengel and Rafe Perich, talking in between a pitching change here at the end, and they said it, they said we’ll hopefully be back here again and win a state championship,” Porrino recalled. “But that’s how high the bar has been set.”

Perich, a freshman who was hitting .419 this season entering the contest, and Mengel are two of the underclassmen who were in the starting lineup on Monday. Freshman Nicholas Henry was the team’s designated hitter, while sophomore Vince Castrine came on in relief and was one of the team’s key cogs in the rotation this year.

Junior cleanup hitter Derek Holmes enjoyed a stellar season, and was hitting .442 at the beginning of the day.

But the Tigers will have to replace several mainstays in the order, such as Trevor Schreiner (.453), Tyler Wiik (.449), leadoff hitter Jake Haas (386) and Austin Stasko (.351), as well as pitchers Mason Vogwill (8-3, 1.95 ERA) and Drew White (5-1, 4.51 ERA), who started Monday’s game.

Wiik has been behind the plate for four seasons, growing into a excellent catcher and a force at the plate.

Being able to experience unprecedented success with the team in his final year with the program is something Wiik wasn’t about to take for granted.

“I told the guys, if you would have told me after one of our losses at the beginning of the year that we would have been playing in the state semifinal game, I would have said you were joking,” said Wiik. “But that’s just how we went until the end of the season. We just looked at it like we were taking it one game at a time, and we wanted to get as far as we could. We didn’t want our season to end.

“We had that mentality, and it helped us get all the way here.”

It wasn’t the result they wanted, but Porrino didn’t want the loss to be what the players focused on after such an extraordinary season.

“It’s gonna stink,” he said. “The bus ride home, they’re gonna be upset. But my biggest thing is, I don’t want them to drive home and think, ‘What if? What if? If this would have happened, if that would have happened.’ Because you can also say that in a game you won.”

For this team, this year, it was a lot of good that happened.

“We had a good run, hopefully the underclassmen can keep the train rolling,” said Schreiner.

These Tigers will be tough to top, and another deep postseason run certainly won’t be easy. But the returning underclassmen have a pretty good example to follow.

“It’s almost impossible to beat this team,” said Mengel. “We’re just trying to get out there (to states). We’re going to have the same mentality as we did this year. We’re just going to try to keep winning. We’re going for districts, we’re going for leagues.

“States is going to be tough, we play some good teams here. But our mentality is to be this team, just like them.”