STANDISH – The numbers that usually matter in high school softball championship games are, in order: Errors, walks, bunt singles.

And OK, maybe those dependable digits played a minimal role in Telstar Regional High School’s 4-2 victory over Georges Valley High School for the Western Class C championship.

Pitch count, typically something baseball micro-managers and orthopedic surgeons sweat and fret, matters little.

Unless you make like the Rebels and suddenly exhibit patience befitting a room full of kindergarten teachers.

“If they were strikes,” said Telstar senior shortstop Candace Hall, “we were going to swing at them.”

One inch outside or just above the blue script letters on Telstar’s tops, and the strategy was to gawk, walk and make Georges Valley ace Danielle Frye take stock.

It led to the oft-forgotten figures that resounded as loudly as the even numbers on the scoreboard.

Frye, who flummoxed Telstar in this game as a freshman and sophomore, flung 143 pitches Tuesday night at Ward Field. Telstar’s tidy if not tournament-tested sophomore Kayla Merrill, who’d never faced the Buccaneers in her life prior to toeing the rubber at Saint Joseph’s College, uncorked only 58.

“She’s a great pitcher,” Telstar coach Jim Lunney said of Frye. “We needed to get people on base and move them to second and third. Then at some point somebody’s got to get a hit. And if we score one or two runs, maybe they get a little nervous.”

Telstar scored four against Frye to crack its half of the dueling goose eggs in the fateful top of the sixth. But the Rebels built that foundation by drawing a base on balls in each of the first four innings, stranding five runners on base and not letting Frye sniff a 1-2-3 inning. Even when the righty reared back and struck out Telstar’s side consecutively in the fifth, the Rebels clung to the reasonable hope that her tank would soon dry.

And after June upon June of watching too many of these 1-0, 2-1 and 4-2 mound masterpieces to count, I wonder, is anybody else paying attention to this script?

Seriously. Are Lunney’s Rebels the only team of their generation wise enough and disciplined enough to pull this off?

No scholastic sport is more of a one-woman show than softball, in part because the nine casting their lot against the one aren’t customarily careful enough to make her earn it.

Today, for instance, Fryeburg’s Hannah Hill and Gray-New Gloucester’s Laura Getchell will lock up in a guaranteed pitchers’ duel that could be over in 57 minutes or might last until Saturday. My kingdom for somebody, anybody, who won’t whiff at the first hint of shoulder-high cheese.

May somebody learn a lesson from a team that filed away its own. Little more than a month ago, on a brisk Monday afternoon in Bethel, the Rebels swung and batted their eyes at the best and worst Frye had to offer. That approach allowed Frye to ring up 18 of her 21 outs by the grace of the ‘K’ in one of those mail-in-the-score-ahead-of-time, 2-1 Mountain Valley Conference showdowns.

More recently, eight days ago, Telstar struck out 15 times even in defeating Frye at the glorified exhibition known as the MVC Championship.

This time, cleanup hitter T.J. Cowin and her teammates were more selective than that lady standing in front of you at the supermarket and pressing her thumbs into every peach.

“We knew she was going to have to throw strikes,” said Cowin, who worked Frye to 3-2 before striking out to end the first inning, then did it again before stroking the line-drive single that triggered the rally in the sixth. “If I got one, I was going to hit it and hustle it out. It was all or nothing.”

For a team whose roster is two-thirds freshmen and sophomores, Telstar’s adherence to the game plan was staggering.

Frye never threw fewer than 14 pitches in an inning. And that low ebb came in the third, when the Rebels ran into the final out on the basepaths.

Only four Telstar batters made contact with the first pitch all night. By contrast, a dozen Bucs bolted from the batter’s box after punctuating Merrill’s first offering with the telltale ping.

Telstar coaxed an astonishing 10 full counts. Even while taking the collar in the fifth, Whitney Mills and Hall each worked Frye to a payoff pitch.

Most importantly, the Rebels cut Frye’s strikeout total from the regular-season meeting in half, to nine.

“Even that day, it was a close game and we knew we could beat them,” Hall said. “Mostly it gave us an idea of what we had to do.”

A splendid idea, at that.

Who knows? Maybe it will inspire some copycats. Softball would become an infinitely better, more team-oriented game if it does.