JEFFREY REINHART jreinhart@LNPnews.com

Man, what a busy time of year (and next week will be even busier). I was at Lancaster Mennonite on Thursday night for the Section 2 boys’ volleyball showdown pitting the host Blazers against Garden Spot. The Spartans needed a win to force a tie (and a one-match playoff) with Mennonite. And early on, it looked like Garden Spot just might pull it off. Then the Blazers took off and won the hardware for the fourth straight year. Amazing. Here’s my story from Friday’s New Era:

With the team’s senior banquet set for tonight, and the quarterfinal round of the Lancaster-Lebanon League playoffs on tap for Monday night, the last thing Lancaster Mennonite’s boys’ volleyball team wanted to do was get stuck having to play a one-match playoff on Saturday night.

So the Blazers took care of business Thursday night.

Mennonite spotted rival Garden Spot the first game before roaring from behind to grab the last three games in a row on the way to a 3-1 win over the Spartans, as the host Blazers clinched their fourth outright Section 2 championship in a row — and sixth crown in the last eight years.

Mennonite, which finished 12-0 in league games, won by game scores of 19-25, 27-25, 25-18 and 25-17.

The victory also gave the Blazers a home match in the L-L League quarterfinals, set for Monday, when Mennonite will host Penn Manor at 6 p.m., followed by another league quarterfinal pitting Manheim Township against Manheim Central at 7:30 p.m.

The other quarterfinal venue Monday is at Hempfield, which is the Section 1 champ.

The Black Knights will take on Elizabethtown at 6 p.m., followed by Garden Spot against Conestoga Valley at 7:30 p.m.

The semifinals are set for Tuesday at Penn Manor at 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and the championship match will be held Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at Warwick.

This is the first year the league is spreading the tournament out over three days.

Garden Spot (10-2) needed a victory Thursday to force a tie for first place with Mennonite — and the one-match playoff that would have accompanied it on Saturday.

“Considering we have our banquet (tonight), I’m glad we won and we don’t have to play Saturday,” Mennonite senior Joe Lab said. “We probably wouldn’t have been awake.”

It took the Blazers the better part of two games to wake up Thursday.

Garden Spot came flying out of the gate, zooming to a 25-19 win in the first game.

Senior hitter Dan Smucker, who had a game-high 13 kills, provided the exclamation point, drilling the game-winning spike off a perfect set from senior Kha Gauying, and the Spartans had all the momentum early on.

Things were looking even peachier for Garden Spot late in the second game, when the Spartans had a pair of game-point situations.

But Garden Spot couldn’t seal the deal, and Mennonite claimed the second game, getting the final two points on Spartans’ unforced errors.

“After we dropped the second game, we hung our heads a little bit,” Garden Spot coach Scott Garber said.

Mennonite took control for good in the third game, leading wire-to-wire in a 25-18 win.

And in the fourth and deciding game, senior hitters Kendall Garber and Cory Weaver took over, each getting a pair of kills in the middle of the game to spark Mennonite’s offense on the way to a 25-17 win.

“Early on we weren’t playing good defense and we were tentative,” Mennonite coach Jeff Kindrew said. “But in the first game I think we got the jitters out and then they went out and played like they can.

“We came alive defensively in the second game, and that really helped us. The defense sparked the offense and we finally got clicking. It kind of snowballed in our favor.”

And Garden Spot could never recover.

“It’s amazing,” Weaver said. “Nobody really expected us to be very good this season. We only really had Kendall coming back. And then we came out here sort of flat tonight. But I think losing that first game made us play a little harder.”

“The first game fired us up,” added Lab, who had a pair of aces and a team-high three blocks.

“Losing that game was an eye opener. The first game didn’t go our way, but in the final three games we really dug deep and found a way to pull it out.”

And keep a stranglehold on the Section 2 hardware in the process.

“This means a lot because coming into this season, we were looked at behind Garden Spot,” Lab said. “So to beat them both times and to win the section for the third time in a row is definitely awesome.”