One might say it’s a very Canadian story: that the Dartmouth High School Spartans haven’t won a game of baseball in 6 years, yet still feel like winners.

Watching them during training, fielding grounders and pop flies, they don’t look like a team who tend to lose most of their games via ‘Mercy rule’ and the rest the old fashioned way at the bottom of the 9th.

Yet for the mob of baseball-mad lads from Nova Scotia, it’s the chance to lace up their cleats, pull on the jersey, and paint their cheeks black that keeps their spirits as high as their losing percentage.

In short, it’s for the love of the game.

“When we lose, we usually get ‘mercied’ which is when you [give up] 10 runs in a certain amount of innings,” said Curtis Snelgrove, the team captain, “and that happens probably 80% of the time.”

“Even through those large defeats, everyone has a blast on the team, we have a great time!”

Snelgrove was speaking with CBC News, and he explained that enthusiasm is kept high by the fact that the Spartans are made up of young men who’ve often never had the chance to play their favorite sport before.

No performance standards translates to no barriers to join the team, and it means that many will bite at the chance, even if it entails facing a 10-run deficit by the 3rd inning.

One such team member, Alex Ansems, said he had never played baseball before joining the Spartans, and tried to make up for this lack of hitting, pitching, and fielding by being a “vibes guy” and pumping the team up.

Those good vibes have carried the Dartmouth High team through 6 winless seasons, and they weren’t even dampened when, having originally been a co-ed team, the femmes broke off, formed their own team, joined the women’s league, and shortly won the first ever game for the high school.

It’s no trash talk at Dartmouth to play ball like a girl, and the still-winless boys were delighted to see it happen.

“It was pretty awesome to see that Spartans baseball won a game, even if it wasn’t my team,” said team member Benjamin Boehner.

The players may stink, but they’re no fools. The continual lesson that losing is a part of life isn’t lost on them, and it’s why they keep taking the field, year after year, hoping that one day someone will come along that’s worse than them.

Because the Spartans are nothing if not game, and because there’s no crying in baseball.