Faced with the prospect of losing three out of four games to the defending league champions Sacramento State softball coach Kathy Strahan asked her hitter to channel a happy memory. As she was walking from the dugout to the third-base coaches box, Strahan stopped at the plate and had a word with Nikki Cinque.

“I told her, ‘Nikki, think about the Syracuse game,'” said Strahan, referring to earlier in the season when Cinque hit a walk-off home run to end a marathon 11-inning game against the Orange.Cinque, who had homered earlier in the game, obliged and led off the bottom of the eighth inning with a homer to left field off Loyola Marymount pitcher Tiffany Pagano. Pagano had shut down the Hornets in both of her starts over the weekend, as she was the game one starter both days. “She had beat me in every other at-bat, and I wanted to beat her,” Cinque said.

But Pagano’s three-inning relief appearance in game two on Sunday proved to be costly as she blew a one-run lead and eventually allowed the homer to Cinque.

“I was a ball of emotions,” Cinque said. “I just wanted the game to be over.”

Sunday’s nightcap was undeniably the wildest game of the series as it featured four lead changes, 13 hits and lasted 2 1/2 hours.

With that win in the fourth and final game of the weekend the Hornets flew out of Los Angeles on Sunday night with a split to a Lions team that clinched the Pacific Coast Softball Conference championship last year at Shea Stadium. In fact, LMU held its championship ring ceremony between games on Saturday, which didn’t sit well with some Hornets.

“We know why they did it,” Strahan said. “We wanted to be party crashers.”

As it turned out, Sac State won the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader after dropping the first game and listening to the Loyola players get their championship rings.

“We came out and beat them in the second game,” senior centerfielder Lindy Winkler said, who went 6-for-13 in the series with three RBIs earning conference player of the week honors. “We shut them up.”

The Hornets are now in a four-way tie for second place in the six-team conference. Portland State swept St. Mary’s over the weekend and San Diego split with Santa Clara as all teams were playing in their conference openers.

Sac State will play a single non-conference game at Stanford at 6 p.m. today before returning to Shea Stadium to play Santa Clara at noon on Friday and Saturday to resume Pacific Coast Softball Conference play.

Short hops

Freshman catcher Jamie Schloredt hit a three-run homer in the second game and is now six RBIs shy of the single-season program record – Cinque is now tied for the team lead in home runs with Schloredt as they both have five – Freshman pitcher Cassie Cervantes picked up both wins for the Hornets combining to strike out 27 batters in the two games.

John Parker can be reached at [email protected]