The Vancouver Little League baseball team falls to Japan on Wednesday, ending the best showing by a Canadian team in nearly a decade.

“Why not us?”

The image of the handwritten sign thrust high in the air at Volunteer Stadium in Williamsport, Penn., was broadcast to millions of homes Wednesday, as Vancouver’s Little Mountain baseball team — already triumphant in the underdog role twice this week — took aim at another Goliath (Godzilla?) in Japan at the Little League World Series.

The line was actually the closing from a poem one of the Little Mountain coaches had written before last year’s trip to the LLWS, which chronicled their journey through district, provincial and national tournaments. But it resonated even stronger this year.

The Vancouver team had beaten Panama in extra innings Monday, then taken down South Korea on Tuesday, with the two knockout wins over favoured competition taking them the farthest a Canadian team had made it since 2017. Their 3-1 record coming into Wednesday’s game was the first time they had had three wins since 1998.

Canada has never won the Little League World Series, with Ontario’s Stoney Creek team coming the closest. They made the championship game in 1965, where they lost 3-1 to the Windsor Locks from Connecticut.

For Gary Hoyano, the belief was there in the stands and with his son Felix on the field, who was Canada’s starting pitcher on the day.

“When you get down here, you don’t really expect to necessarily win … but why not? Why not imagine that you got a chance? And this year we did so well. It was pretty incredible that we won three games. It’s been a historic thing. It’s been pretty amazing,” he said.

But in the end, the mountain was too big for the boys from Little Mountain. Their uphill battle grew steep by the third inning, when Japan’s Taiga Yumitori’s three-run blast bounced off the top of the right-field wall to give Japan a 7-0 lead.

Final score, Japan 7, Canada 3.

Japan advanced to face Nicaragua’s Ministerio Sobre Las Alas Del Aguila on Thursday, and won that game 4-1. They will play Curaçao in the international final on Saturday. The tournament is broken into two brackets — 10 American teams on one side, and 10 international teams on the other, with the two champions meeting in the title game Sunday.

The first inning saw Canada go three up, three down, with the first trio of batters retiring in under two minutes of play. Manager Brad Dorwart could tell that it buoyed Japan and planted a seed of doubt in his team’s head.

“It just seemed to be the lights were too bright,” he said of the early going. “They just started not making plays that they’d been making all year. In those three wins that we had. We weren’t missing the beat, making really any errors. All of a sudden, you know, we can’t make a simple ground ball into a double play, and can’t catch a fly ball.

“We tried not to put so much pressure on the kids, knowing how special this is. … But they just seem to be squeezing the bat a little too tight.”

Japan had 10 hits to Canada’s four on the day, though Felix Hoyano got Canada on the board with an RBI single in the fourth inning. At the top of the fifth, Canada got an RBI single from Lucas Izen and a fielder’s choice from Jean Ramos to make it 7-3, but that was as close as they would make it.

Gary Hoyano and his wife had rebooked their flights twice this week as Little Mountain kept winning, and while some parents had their company laptops on their knees during the game, the Hoyanos were lucky enough to be able to send a few emails to their bosses back home to beg off work.

They’ll be back in Canada by Thursday night as, this time, there’s no need to rebook their flights.

“I’m feeling spent. Completely exhausted. And (the team is) doing all the work,” Hoyano said, laughing. “It’s really emotionally draining, exciting and all those things that make us love sports. But it’s got to end at some point, right?

“We’re going to be able to look back at the resilience of this team, the way that they always battled and the way that they supported each other. They had so much fun. So many smiles and the way that they were lifting each other up. It’s just an amazing group of kids … They’ve known each other since they were like seven or eight years old, so these are relationships that are going to last a lifetime.

“It’s been a really fun ride. It’s too bad it’s over, but we knew it had to end at some point. The team really came together, it was just really remarkable to watch.”

The season was the longest Dorwart could remember playing, with 32 games under their belt in a short summer season. They had to drive through forest fires to get to Trail, B.C., to play the provincials in 38-degree heat, then turn around and fly to Glace Bay, N.S., for the nationals, then head south to the U.S. for the World Series. It’s been a grind, he said, but worth it.

The team will have travelled more than 10,000 kms before they get on their flight home on Friday. First up, a dinner out to get a break from the repetitive dorm food they’d survived on this past week. Japanese food was on the menu Thursday, where they expected to reunite with their opponents from Wednesday at the same restaurant.

Little Mountain has gone to the LLWS three out of the past five years. This group watched the previous teams experience it, and now 10 of the 12 players on the team will age out — just Kian Sandu and Sha Hassko are eligible to return — as a new group will represent the neighbourhood.

“After the game, the kids were very upset and emotional, not just over losing, but knowing that it’s over. I think that’s the biggest thing for them was knowing that the season’s over. It was it was it was a hard pill to swallow, even for the coaches. Like we were all starting to get choked up too, because we’ve been enjoying this whole ride,” Dorwart said. “It was something special.

“Now it’s time to go back to work and reality. I was like, ‘Hey, kids, sorry, you got to go back to school within a week, and I got to go back to work within a few days. It’s reality that sets in. The fairy tale is over … for the moment. Very grateful to have been part of this whole run. Lots of stuff to look back and reflect on.”

Williamsport, located a three-hour drive between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, is the birthplace of Little League, dating to 1939 when a lumberyard clerk named Carl E. Stotz gathered together his two nephews and some of their buddies and came up with the rules and regulations.

The first Little League World Series was played there in 1947, featuring just teams from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The 12-and-under tournament moved to its main location at Howard J. Lamade Stadium, which is just across the West Branch Susquehanna River in South Williamsport, in 1959. You can take the Carl E. Stotz Memorial Little League Bridge to get there from Williamsport.

ABC started televising the final in 1963. ESPN has come on board, and with more games available on various platforms, viewers have kept tuning in. Honolulu’s 13-3, mercy-ruled, four inning win over Curaçao in 2022 was the least-watched title game in two decades, according to sportmediawatch.com, and it still drew 2 1/2 million viewers.

Little League can tend to be a catch-all phrase for youth baseball, but it’s just one brand of the game. Youth baseball is cola. Little League is the Coke or the Pepsi. The other main version is governed through Baseball Canada, and the baseball folk tend to call it minor or minor baseball.

— With files from Steve Ewen