HOLLYWOOD — They lost 11–2 on Wednesday and 8–5 on Friday, and the second one was the one that hurt, because they led it into the fifth.

The Cahuenga Cardinals’ season ended in sectional play last week, two weeks after the district championship that put them in this newspaper for the first time in nineteen years. The team that beat them on Friday came from a program with two dedicated fields, a batting cage under a roof, and a pitching coach who is paid to be a pitching coach. Art Sandoval, who runs the Cardinals on evenings after his shift at a print shop, watched their pregame infield drill and said something to his assistant that he was willing to repeat on the record.

“I said, ‘Those kids have taken more ground balls this summer than mine have taken in their lives.’ And that is not a complaint. That’s just what it is. You can see it in nine minutes of warm-ups.”

The gap showed up where gaps like that always show up, which is not in talent but in repetition. The Cardinals hit the ball hard all week. They also gave away four runs on Friday in one inning on two misplayed relays and a throw to the wrong base — the kind of thing a team fixes with three hundred repetitions in June, and the Cardinals were in June putting on a raffle.

Sandoval has been careful, all week, about how he talks about this in front of the boys.

“You do not tell an eleven-year-old that he lost because he’s poor,” he said. “That is a true sentence and it is a poison sentence, and I will not say it in that dugout. What I told them is that the other team had more practices and we’re going to get more practices. Which is also true, and which I now have to go make true.”

So the parade happened.

It happened on Sunday afternoon at four, which was the coolest hour anyone could arrange, and it consisted of a flatbed truck borrowed from a landscaping company, eleven boys in uniform sitting on hay bales, two coaches walking alongside, and a route that went nine blocks down Franklin Avenue and then turned around and came back because the permit was for a rolling procession and nobody had thought to ask what happened at the end of it. The fire station on the route put its engine in the driveway and sounded the horn. The Copper Kettle sent out a tray of lemonade. Somewhere around the fourth block the boys stopped waving self-consciously and started waving like a parade.

“They lost. So what,” said Lorena Ibarra, who has run the Cardinals’ snack bar for three seasons and keeps its accounts in a spiral notebook. “They won a district for the first time since 2007. My son is on that truck. I sold four thousand hot dogs so he could be on that truck. There was going to be a parade.”

Her notebook, which is the truest document the program has, closed the season $1,140 ahead — the best margin she has recorded, helped by two home playoff games in hot weather, when a case of water bought at the warehouse store becomes forty dollars a case at the fence.

The money is already spoken for, and the boys know what it is for, because Sandoval told them on the truck. It is a fall winter-ball entry fee for anyone who wants one, which buys roughly eleven more weeks of playing, and a set of used pitching machine parts a coach in the Valley is selling for less than they are worth.

“Three hundred ground balls,” Sandoval said. “That’s the whole plan. Get to next July having taken three hundred more ground balls than we took this year. That’s not a strategy, that’s just arithmetic, and arithmetic I can do.”

Two of his better players have been approached by travel programs since the district title, which he expected and does not begrudge. One family has said no already, citing the cost. The other is thinking.

At the end of the route the truck stopped, the boys climbed down, and the driver asked Sandoval whether that was it. Sandoval looked at his watch, then at the nine blocks behind him, and told the boys to get back on.