Imagine this. It’s 1942. Springtime. The country is in the first of months of a war that is already one of the deadliest catastrophes in world history. By the time it ends in 1945, 30 million people are no longer among the living.

You’re 18 years old in your final semester at Turners Falls High School. There are only 34 boys in your graduating class. Death is starring every one of you in the face.

What will you do between now and the time you’re called to serve? Complete your degree, of course, but what about when you’re not at school?

With time now playing a more important role in your life, you ask yourself what you enjoy doing more than anything else in the world. What would you most regret if you didn’t do it before being shipped across the Atlantic or the Pacific?

You answer that question in one word: baseball!

You’ve been playing the game almost as long as you can remember. It’s one of the ways you measure your life. Tulips and daffodils don’t announce spring’s arrival; the crack of the bat does. The diamond is the one place where you feel most alive.

There was no Little League in 1942. Kids played on make-shift community teams. Because there were so many kids in your town, whole teams could be made up from just a few neighborhoods with games played on the weekends. Fourth Street and Fifth Street had their own teams. So did the Patch and the Top of the Hill. Newt Guilbault, the unofficial recreation director at Unity Park, organized the teams into leagues, posted the weekend schedules, and made sure the fields were maintained.

But you never waited for the weekends to play. No one did. From early morning to as late in the day as you could see the ball, you were on the field, in the batter’s box, or waiting your turn at the plate. Only food, sleep, and Sunday church services stopped you from swinging, catching, running and throwing.

Enter Earl Lorden. He was considered a smart guy who knew more than a little about baseball when he was hired to coach the Turners Fall High School team, but his true genius was realizing the gift bestowed upon him by the parents of the kids who showed up to play. To say they were talented is an understatement. All Lorden had to do was put them in the right positions, turn them loose at game times, and watch his team of neighborhood all-stars propel themselves to the Massachusetts State Championship games in 1937 and again in 1940.

Both times they lost.

Those losses would have been an achievement to be proud of at any time, but they were even more so then. Here’s why: there were no divisions in school sports based on the size of a school’s population or the number of people in a town. All the champions of all the high school baseball leagues were thrown into a lose-and-you’re-out tournament with the final game being played in Fenway Park. The home of the Boston Red Sox was a long way from Unity Park, and still is.

Then came the 1942 team. Lorden could tell it was a good one, but it lacked power at the plate and not many of his younger players could be counted on to make up in talent what they lacked in skills. They needed work on the game’s fundamentals. Things like not being too eager at the plate, catching the ball with both hands so you can get it out of your glove faster, running the bases and knowing when to steal one, taking advantage of the little-used bunt, and placing the ball where the opposing players weren’t standing. Earl believed the kids could get more out of amassing singles and doubles than swinging for the fences — what in today’s game is called “small ball.”

That small ball led to big wins. Nine of them without a single defeat. That may not seem like much to cheer about today, especially when three of those victories were shutouts against lowly Greenfield High, but the schedules of all the teams in the state had been cut short by war-related travel restrictions and rationing of food and gas.

None of that mattered. Turners Falls High School was unbeaten. The team also showed a lot of promise. They may have collectively batted only .230, but they stole 51 bases, and their two pitchers, Walter Kostanski and Arthur Burke, chalked up a combined 105 strikeouts.

The playoff wins did not come so readily. Amherst High’s undefeated right-hander, Johnny Rogers, threw 12 strikeouts and held the Turners nine to three hits. But those three were one more than the Amherst nine could tally against Kostanski and all the boys in blue needed to win. Final score: Turners 1, Amherst 0.

Walter Fiala of West Springfield High would go on to play 12 seasons in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system, but he never made it to Fenway Park: Turners 5, West Springfield 2.

In the western Massachusetts final, Turners’ bats came alive, and Kostanski pulled a Johnny Rogers with a 12-strikeout performance against a team that included the region’s Most Valuable Player, Artie Young: Turners 8, Classical 4.

The Big Show at Fenway Park began with a crucial decision made days before. Coach Lorden reserved rooms for himself, his assistant George Richason, and his team of 15 players at the famous Lenox Hotel in Boston. For both of his last two trips to the state final, the teams from Turners were driven to the park on the day of the game. Lorden thought the pre-Interstate trip of four hours put his boys at a disadvantage against the locals who had slept the previous nights at home with their families. And just to make sure there would be no slip-ups, Coach booked all the team’s rooms on the seventh floor for good luck.

Lorden’s roundballers would need all they could get. Arlington High, which landed three players on the Boston Globe’s Scholastic All-Star team, forced Turners’ Kostanski into more three-and-two counts than he’d seen in all the playoff games combined and cracked two hits in each of three innings at bat. But they also left 13 players on base, and that, as much as anything else, kept the game within reach.

Turners scored its first run in the top of the seventh to tie the game, but Arlington blasted Kostanski for three runs in the bottom of the inning before Burke came in to get the final out. Going into the eighth, All-Star pitcher Jack Cunha had given up only three harmless singles. The Menotomy Towners’ three-run lead seemed insurmountable.

That’s when Coach Lorden’s investment to stay on the seventh floor of the Lenox Hotel began to pay off. With two outs and a runner on third, Turners infielder Ted Mucha hit an easy one-hopper back to the mound, but the ball took an unexpected bounce over Cunha’s head. Two hits later, one by the never-say-die Kostanski, and the score was tied at 4.

Burke shut out Arlington in the bottom of the eighth, and then, with two outs in the top of the ninth, he singled to left and stole second. The stage was now set for the Welcome Wallop.

Catcher Harvey Welcome was probably the most dangerous hitter on the Turners side, but for most of this game, he’d been Arlington’s secret weapon. In his last four times at bat, he’d hit into three double plays.

But that was then; this was now. Welcome calmly jacked Cunha’s 2-0 fastball off Fenway’s center-field fence to knock in Burke for the winning run.

Turners Falls High School was the Massachusetts state champion of baseball.

The first to learn of their team’s historic win were the hometowners listening to the live play-by-play on WHAI radio. Next was the crowd that watched the inning-by-inning score being posted outside the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette office near the Shea Theater. By the time the victors arrived at Greenfield Station at 2 a.m., close to 1,000 fans in 210 cars were waiting to turn on their lights and parade the players home as heroes.

Which they were, and still are. On Thursday, March 7, the team with its lone surviving member, George Bush, and its legendary Coach Earl Lorden will be inducted into the Western Massachusetts Baseball Hall of Fame. Lorden went on from Turners Falls High School to coach baseball at the University of Massachusetts from 1948 to 1966. His 189 victories place him third on the university’s all-time baseball wins list, and the home field is honored with his name. George Bush is teacher emeritus from Turners Falls High School.

The induction ceremony and banquet will be held at the Twin Hills Country Club in Longmeadow. For more information, contact www.valleybluesox.com.