Topeka ? Adrenaline can’t be purchased at a store. It can’t be packed into an equipment bag. Adrenaline picks athletes, not the other way around. It makes basketball players jump higher and at times shoot better. Unannounced visits to golfers result in drained putts, green after undulating green.

It impacts baseball players more subtly. It tends to visit high school athletes in the final days of their senior seasons.

Adrenaline clearly paid a visit to Lawrence High’s four senior baseball players Wednesday afternoon at sunny Shawnee County Amateur Baseball Association park.

The circumstances – lose, and your high school baseball career is over – generated the adrenaline for the seniors, who played big roles in a 4-3 victory against Manhattan High, setting up the nightcap 9-1 rout of Washburn Rural.

In the first game, Lawrence High’s aggressive defense backfired at times behind left-hander Tom Schuh, as the ball was thrown wildly by his fielders more than once. Nothing in the way Schuh went about his business suggested that ate at him. He stayed locked in on the mitt of born-to-play-ball catcher Chase Muder. Schuh worked six innings, and the three runs he allowed all were unearned.

“I love throwing to Chase,” Schuh said. “He sets up a good target, and I’ve been throwing to him for a long time.”

The lefty-swinging Muder, battling to stay alive with two strikes, delivered the game’s biggest hit, a slicing, just-fair double to left that drove in two runs and gave LHS a 4-2 lead in the fifth.

Joe Kornbrust had one hit to show for it, but stung the baseball harder and louder than anyone in the game, smacking two long outs to the outfield. He threw hard as well with a 1-2-3 seventh inning for the save. Muder got out of his crouch, raced back, whipped his mask off and squeezed the final out.

“It felt like it stayed up there forever,” Muder said. “I knew I had to catch it for the seniors. We didn’t want it to end.”

Muder, Schuh, Kornbrust and Travis Sanders (single, walk, hit by a pitch), the seniors, took a back seat to junior Dorian Green’s dominance in the night game that clinched a berth in the state tourney. The seniors made it possible.

Baseball eats at the psyche, even more than the body. To make it all the way to varsity ball requires mental toughness, physical skill and the drive to work on strengthening weaknesses. For Muder, that meant learning to run faster, one of the tougher feats to pull off in sports. He said he enrolled in “three or four” six-week sessions at TherapyWorks Sports Acceleration in Lawrence. The training involved high-velocity treadmill workouts and plyometrics. Without that work, maybe he doesn’t steal third base and then score the Lions’ fourth run on a wild pitch. Big run.

“We only have four seniors on the roster and all four did something special,” LHS coach Brad Stoll said after the first game. At that point, Stoll sounded plenty confident that Green would twirl a beauty at night. The coaching staff identified a mechanical flaw and marveled at how quickly Green, so bright and athletic, made the corrections.

Now the Lions join the rest of Lawrence in rooting for Free State to win a pair at home today to join them in Topeka next weekend.