Lake's eight-year championship drought ended on Tuesday night when the Flyers clinched their first Suburban Lakes League baseball title since 2003.

With the game tied at two in the seventh, Josh Tantari's two-run home run broke the 2-2 tie and proved to be the game-winner as Lake edged rival Elmwood, 4-2, to — finally put a cap on its 23-4 season.

“It was a great way to end the season.  All year, we had a different hero every game. It was so fun because you never knew who was going to step up,” said 27th-year head coach Greg Wilker.

The win marked the end to a long and eventful season for Wilker and his five seniors.

First Teall All SLL junior shortstop, Ryan Kohlhofer.(Press photo by Nathan Lowe)

“The only other time I can remember a spring like this, was during my first year as jayvee coach. I remember it was so rainy and the season didn’t end until the first week of June.”

For Wilker, whose Flyers finished undefeated at 11-0 in league play, it’s nice to be back on top. In doing so, outfielder Kurt McKee has been named Suburban Lakes League Player of the Year.

“For the last number of years, we have always been competitive but our league was full of good teams,” Wilker said. “We would come close — finish in second or third — but just couldn’t quite win it.  So, it feels good to be back on top, it really does.  I think we’re going to be a threat for a number of years.”

Although, in his opinion, “a league championship is a league championship whether you win it outright or share it,” this title will be shared with no one as it solely belongs to the Flyers.

“We would like to win it outright, but if you win a league championship it doesn’t really matter if you have to share it,” Wilker said.  “If it says league championship on that trophy, your league champions so it really doesn’t matter.  But, this was nice.”

Since he began his head coaching career at Lake in the mid-1980s, the veteran Wilker has won six league championships, two coming in the Northern Lakes League and four coming in the SLL. Now, he'll have to take his act to the Northern Buckeye Conference when inaugural play begins next season.

“It’s nice to say ‘yeah, we won the last SLL championship,’ but, to me, it still going to be a similar league next year.  It’s not like when we jumped from the NLL to the SLL where you have a total new league. It is the same league with two new teams.”

Wilker said he has been blessed with great talent over the years, but more importantly, quality, hard working student athletes — and this group is no different.

“I’ve been blessed with a lot of good teams over the years and more importantly good kids,” said Wilker.  “This group really pulled for each other. They wanted to see each other succeed and wanted to make each other better.  They didn’t care who got the reward — who the winning pitcher was or whose name was in the paper for getting a big hit.  They just wanted to go out and win and have fun, and that’s what they did.”

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