DEER PARK, Tex. — By the fifth inning, the eye black the players had smeared on their faces was smudging from the sweat. They usually painted straight black lines to cut the glare from the sun and stadium lights, but for this game the shape on their cheeks was a cross.

The Santa Fe High School baseball team, the Indians, played the Kingwood Park Panthers Saturday night. On Friday morning, the Santa Fe players had fled classrooms and hallways that echoed with gunfire as a gunman killed 10 people at their school; the next night, they put on their green uniforms, stepped onto the diamond in nearby Deer Park and played seven innings in a regional quarterfinal.

Rome Shubert, 16, one of Santa Fe’s pitchers, sat on a metal folding chair near the dugout for the opening pitch. He had been grazed in the back of the head by a bullet on Friday. Trenton Beazley, 15, a catcher also injured by gunfire, stood near him with his arm in a sling. Other players had been close enough to hear the gunshots or to huddle in classroom closets for several panicked minutes as the gunman, identified by authorities as a 17-year-old student named Dimitrios Pagourtzis, opened fire with a shotgun and handgun.

They did not have to be here.

The players, their parents and their coaches gathered for a meeting on Friday, hours after the shooting. Their playoff game that night had already been canceled, but their game on Saturday was still a question mark. All of the adults eventually stepped outside the meeting, leaving the boys on the team to debate among themselves whether to postpone Saturday’s game.