Kouda, the Tomakomai coach, said, “We were almost cast into the role of villains.”

Feeling sickly, Tanaka had yet to be his sharpest in four games over 10 days while pitching a taxing 32 2/3 innings. The night before the final, Kouda asked his ace if he wanted to start the game, and Tanaka begged off.

“If possible, I want to pitch later,” the coach recalled him saying.

Kouda complied with his tired pitcher’s wishes but did not allow him to rest too long. Tanaka entered the scoreless game with one out in the third inning. Both he and Saito threw masterfully. Tomakomai took a 1-0 lead in the top of the eighth, but Waseda tied it up in the bottom of the inning. The two pitchers, like weary but indomitable warriors, kept the score at 1-1 through 15 innings, when the game was declared a tie. The teams would need to return to the precipice in a second championship game the next day.

Saito had thrown 178 pitches during the tie, Tanaka 165, a punishing workload that an American orthopedist might have likened to child abuse. But they both were obliged to pitch again with no rest. Saito started; Tanaka came in during the first inning with his team trailing, 1-0. Neither pitcher was as sharp as the day before, but their perseverance seemed to epitomize the fighting spirit of the Koshien. Waseda took a 4-1 lead into the top of the ninth, but Tomakomai rallied with a two-run homer.

Saito was obviously exhausted, the fatigue following him like a shadow as he stalked about the mound. Yet he continued to summon strength from somewhere deep within. He managed to get two outs, and the radar gun still timed his fastball at 91 miles per hour. But he needed to get past one more batter: his rival, Tanaka, one of Tomakomai’s best hitters, who had a .345 average during the tournament.

Saito had already thrown 941 pitches in less than two weeks. Tanaka, who had thrown 742, took several practice swings, slicing into the empty air. He did not even look at Saito before entering the batter’s box. The television cameras feasted on the tension, zooming in on one boy’s face, and then the other’s.

The Handkerchief Prince hunched his shoulders and went into his windup.

It was, Tanaka’s coach said, Nihon no bi, a beautiful Japanese moment.

‘Always Intensity’

Japan once had a popular comic book series called Kyojin no Hoshi, Star of the Giants. It was later adapted for television, movies and a video game. The stories were of a young boy who wanted to be a baseball great. He was relentlessly, even cruelly, pushed toward that goal by his father, who put his son through an onerous regimen of training. The show “was grounded in the harsh work ethic that Japan embraced” as it “clawed its way up from the ashes” of World War II, wrote Robert Whiting, author of several books about baseball in Japan. The All-Star Ichiro Suzuki, now with the Yankees, had such a father. So did many boys.