Less than 24 hours after graduating from high school, the five seniors on the Stoughton High softball team also saw their high school softball careers come to an end, Friday afternoon at New Bedford in the preliminary round of the MIAA Division 1 South Sectional state tournament.

A late offensive burst propelled New Bedford past Stoughton 7-0. Leading 1-0 going into the bottom of the fifth, the Whalers scored three times in the fifth and three more times in the sixth.

And while New Bedford came up with some timely hits late in the game, the star for the Whalers was their pitcher, Brittany Carvalho.

The junior limited the Black Knights to just two hits, and didn’t allow a base runner over the final four innings.

“She’s very consistent,” Stoughton coach Janet Sullivan said of Carvalho. “She’s not overwhelming with her speed, she’s not even overwhelming with her mix of pitches, but she has good control…She kept us off balance.”

Stoughton ends the season at 10-11.

While the Black Knights’ tournament run was brief, the game itself was meaningful with Stoughton making their first postseason appearance in four years.

It also gave the seniors on the team the chance to play in a postseason game before wrapping up their Stoughton High career.

“It was a good way to end a good senior year, to go to tournament and make it as far as we did,” senior second baseman Megan Guerard said.

“Graduating is a big thing and ending softball—[it’s] been a big part of our lives for the past 12 years, so ending all of it kind of on short notice, it’s a lot; it’s really overwhelming; it’s emotional,” senior catcher Molly Zuk said.

Sullivan said the team’s five seniors—Zuk, Guerard and pitcher Jess Olans, centerfielder Colleen Flaherty and right fielder Nicole Beauregard—keyed Stoughton’s success this season.

“I think for the seniors the culmination of four years of hard work it was really nice to go out playing in a game that was so important, meant so much, and a couple of hits here or there and I think we could have been right in the game,” Sullivan said.

Jordan Angelos had a double in the first inning and Bailey Olsen legged out an infield single in the third, but the Stoughton bats were otherwise quiet.

New Bedford scored their first run of the game in the third. Alexis DeBrosse tripled with one out and then Courtney Miranda doubled to bring her home.

Then the Whalers put the game out of reach, with six runs in their final two at-bats.

“We were throwing a lot of off-speed stuff and they had trouble adjusting the first time up, so we got through the first part of the order pretty well, but by the time they came up the second or third time, they’ve got their timing down and it’s hard to keep a good hitting team like that down for too long,” Sullivan said.

Still, Sullivan paid high compliments to her pitcher.

“I thought Jessie [Olans] pitched a great game and [had a] great season,” she said. “The whole team played well, but she’s the main reason why we made the tournament. She just had a phenomenal year.”

Stoughton started the season 3-6, but ended strong, winning five of their last seven to get to .500 (10-10) and qualify for the tournament.  

“This year was kind of up and down for us,” Zuk said. “We started off with a [low] win percentage, we didn’t really win a lot of games, but then we turned it around in the last half of the season, and we really pulled it together to get into the tournament.

“It really means a lot to us that for our senior season and our last game it was a tournament game, and it was a big game, and we played our best.”

“We’ve been playing since STOAYC, travel, we love the game, Olans added, “and it’s going to be really hard to leave Stoughton.”

Check out interviews with the five seniors and coach Sullivan in the media gallery above.