It’s been a long time coming.

With a stretch of 18 seasons since its last District 11 championship and six other trips to the district finals with no gold medals to show, Northwestern has been hungry for a softball title.

Tuesday evening at Parkland High School, the gold medals were no longer elusive as the Lady Tigers downed North Schuylkill 11-1 for their first district championship since winning the 2A classification in 2007.

Rylee McGinley led off Tuesday’s game by putting herself into scoring position with a fly ball to left field, opening the game with a triple. Emma Freeman then dropped a safety squeeze to third and when the throw went to first, McGinley easily dashed home for a 1-0 lead.

“It felt great to get the game started that way,” McGinley said. “Whenever you can start with a big play it just gives you momentum and I think we saw that today with how we were able to build on the momentum throughout the game.”

McGinley also singled and scored a run to make her one of four Northwestern players to have a multi-hit game.

Sophomore Ainsley Behler contributed a pair of doubles to drive in a team-high three runs.

In the third inning, Abby Dunstan lined a single to left and Northwestern hitters were determined not to leave her there. Freshman Natalie Conner followed with an RBI double, and Shelby Mitman delivered the first of her three singles in the game to put two runners on.

Sophomore Ainsley Behler then drove in both runners with the first of her two doubles to make it 4-0 through three innings.

“I’m glad that I could contribute to it,” said Behler. “Our confidence level is really high, and the energy is great. Our bench was a lot louder than it normally is because our energy level is so high and everyone was so excited to play for this.”

The Tigers used fundamental softball in the fourth to push across four more runs.

A leadoff walk by Ella Bressi was followed by Lizzie Diehl’s sacrifice bunt. McGinley singled to make it 5-0. Emma Freeman followed with a ground ball to third with the throw to first being wide of first base, which allowed McGinley to score and Freeman to go to second.

Dunstan, who finished the day a home run shy of the cycle, hit a long, high fly ball off the fence in left field for an RBI triple and a 7-0 lead. Conner followed with a fly ball to center that was deep enough to score Dunstan with the final run of the inning.

“I thought that one might have gone out because I knew I hit it pretty well,” said Dunstan, who is now hitting .500 (8-for-16) with two home runs and eight RBI in the postseason. “The other one was more of a line drive, but that one was up in the air longer and I feel like in most other parks it would have gone out.”

Few home runs are hit at Parkland because of legitimate dimensions and an eight-foot tall outfield fence, but Dunstan also came close again in her next at-bat, blasting a fly ball to left center field that fell a couple feet shy of the fence for a double.

Mitman singled and Behler lined her second double of the day to left field to score Dunstan for a 9-0 lead. Samantha Boyer’s single to center field brought in both runners to end the game via the 10-run rule.

Freeman threw another complete game for the Lady Tigers, allowing five hits and two walks to go with two strikeouts, all of which resulted in just one unearned run.

Freeman went through an uncharacteristic stretch of eight innings without gaining a strikeout over the semifinals and finals. The junior currently has 495 career strikeouts.

“Scouting them we knew that they don’t strike out a lot,” she said. “We knew that they are able to put the ball in play. The defense was able to make plays behind me, and I was able to pitch where they weren’t able to get a lot of hard hit balls.”

A loss to Palisades in the Colonial League finals left a bad taste in the mouths of the Northwestern players, but they used that to regroup and focus on getting the elusive gold medals that they wanted in districts.

“The loss in the Colonial League final was a little bit of a lump for us,” said Dunstan. “But we took it and learned from it and came into this game with a different mentality and more energy.”

Northwestern will play the District 4 champion, either Athens or Central Columbia, in the opening round of states on Monday.