In the home dugout at Shea Stadium, above a drinking fountain and just to the left of a doorway sits a sign.

Neatly printed in black ink on pink paper and laminated, it reads: “Do not rest fingers in the doorway while using the drinking fountain.”

To 19 players on the Sacramento State softball team, the sign serves as a warning; to senior pitcher Brianne Ferguson, the sign’s author, it’s a painful reminder — for she had to learn the hard way.

During a practice last April, Ferguson was in the dugout getting a drink of water while another player was entering the restroom and inadvertently slammed the last three fingers on her pitching hand in the doorframe.

“That had to be the worst physical pain I’ve felt in my entire life,” recalled Ferguson of the injury that derailed her season a year ago.

Ferguson said her fingers swelled so badly that she could not pitch without excruciating pain. Ferguson had notched the most victories on the team with 16 and was its most solid pitcher until the door slammed shut on her junior campaign.

Sac State was 10-2 in conference at that point with only the two top teams in the Pacific Coast Softball Conference — Loyola Marymount and Santa Clara — standing in its way.

The Hornets dropped their final eight games in a row to finish 2004 with an overall record of 32-28 and a conference mark of 10-10.

“That wiped us right off the map,” Hornets coach Kathy Strahan said. “She did everything she could against LMU, but the pain was too much.”

Ferguson made two starts against LMU, surrendering five earned runs in five innings in the second of four games against the Lions and six earned runs in seven innings in the finale of the series — her final appearance of the year.

“It was so frustrating having to sit in the dugout and watch, especially the Santa Clara series,” Ferguson said. “Those were the longest two days ever.”

In the final four games of the season at home, the Hornets were thoroughly dominated by then-Santa Clara pitcher Jaime Forman-Lau. Forman-Lau won three games and recorded a save that weekend propelling her team to a Pacific Coast Softball Conference Championship, which the Broncos celebrated at Shea Stadium in the waning sunshine on a balmy May evening.

“For the last two years, one person has stood between us and getting to the other side and that person is Jaime Forman-Lau,” Strahan told The State Hornet immediately after the season finale last year.

Forman-Lau, now the Broncos coach preparing her team for the Pacific Coast opener this weekend against Sac State, said that Santa Clara’s 2004 late-season run is indicative of what can happen in conference play, when teams face each other four times in one weekend.

“Conference is crazy,” Forman-Lau said. “People get up to play teams in their own conference, you see a lot of surprise performances and sleepers stepping up.”

As if the six member conference didn’t have enough to play for before, now the Pacific Coast has an automatic qualifier, meaning the conference champion earns an automatic trip to NCAA regionals.

With two starters with sub-1.00 earned run averages in Ferguson (0.87) and junior Nikki Cinque (0.97) and a talented sophomore in Jennifer Fryou, pitching isn’t an issue — these Hornets are hoping their bats can match the pace of that pitching pair’s arms.

Junior center fielder Lindy Winkler has been the offensive catalyst, hitting a scintillating .404 since moving to the third-spot in the batting order from the leadoff role she fulfilled in her first two years at Sac State.

“When coach put me in that spot, I knew she had confidence in me to do well,” Winkler said. “I can still play my game there; I can still slap and bunt.”

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John Parker can be reached at [email protected]