MISQUAH — By the bottom of the fourth inning Wednesday, the Pine City scorekeeper had stopped writing and started simply watching, which is the highest compliment one scorebook can pay another team, and the only sane response to what the Vekved triplets were doing to the visitors at Memorial Field.

The final was 18–2, Lakeside, in a summer-league softball game called after five innings on the run rule. Twelve of those runs scored on three swings: a grand slam by Maren Vekved in the second inning, a grand slam by Greta Vekved in the third, and a grand slam by Liv Vekved in the fourth — three sisters, eleven years old, identical, clearing the bases in three consecutive innings, a sequence the league office could not confirm had ever happened before because, an official said, “we wouldn’t have thought to check.”

The Vekveds farm dairy east of town, and the three girls have played together, against their will and then very much with it, since tee-ball. They are indistinguishable in the field, indistinguishable at the plate, and — opposing pitchers will tell you — indistinguishable in the specific way each one waits on a pitch before doing something terrible to it. “You strike one out and you feel great,” said Pine City coach Randy Dolen, “and then the next one comes up and she’s got the same face, and you realize there are two more of her. It’s not fair. I don’t mean it’s against the rules. I mean the universe isn’t fair.”

Lois Hamre, who has kept the Lakeside book for nineteen summers, had to invent a notation Wednesday to mark three bases-clearing home runs by three different players with the same last name in consecutive frames. “I put a little star and three sets of initials,” she said. “Then I put a second star. I’ll know what it means.”

Their coach, Curt Halvorsen, has been predicting this, loudly, to anyone cornered near the concession stand, since the sisters were six. “I said it at tee-ball and people smiled at me like I was a nice man having a nice time,” Halvorsen said. “I’m telling you again, on the record, in your newspaper: those three are going to be Division One all-stars. Write it down. Put a date on it. I want to be able to point at it.” He was given the date, which is today.

The girls themselves were less expansive. Asked which of them had hit it hardest, the three conferred briefly and produced a unanimous and unhelpful answer: that it didn’t matter, because they share. Their parents, Karl and Janet Vekved, who milk eighty head and rearrange the evening chores around the schedule, said only that the three had hit the batting cage Karl built in the machine shed “every night it wasn’t storming, and a few nights it was.”

The Pike are 7–0 and play again after the holiday. Halvorsen, asked whether he worried about the rest of the league catching up, did not. “They’re eleven,” he said. “They’re going to get better. That’s the part that should scare people.”