North Penn’s Caleb Price committed the balk heard ’round the world. He’s the right kind of kid to handle the fallout.

It took Caleb Price a while before he could talk about it all. He needed to clear his head. Hell, he needed to graduate from high school.

On Friday, June 13, he was at the center of one of the most unusual and heartbreaking sports stories of the year. A senior at North Penn, he was pitching in the bottom of the 13th inning in the PIAA Class 6A championship game at Medlar Field on Penn State’s campus. The opposing team, Cedar Cliff, from Camp Hill, had loaded the bases with no outs. The game was still scoreless. While Price was standing on the rubber, his right leg twitched. He was called for a balk. The winning run scored. The Knights had lost, 1-0. On a balk. It’s worth repeating and repeating, because the circumstances were so strange and unfortunate and even outrageous. They lost the state championship game on a balk.

On Tuesday, June 17, North Penn held its commencement ceremony. It was a quick turnaround for Price, from one stage of life to the next, and maybe it was for the best. He did not have time to dwell.

“I was just so surprised,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I was at a loss for words, honestly.”

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Hardly anyone else was. The story went viral. It had all the makings: a controversial ending, the euphoric Cedar Cliff players and coaches, the crestfallen North Penn kids, ready-made debates about whether Price had committed a balk at all and about whether, even if he had committed a balk, it was so egregious that the umpires should have called it. You can’t call that there! … No, you have to call that there! … No, you should let the kids decide the game! … No, the rules are the rules! A clip of the game’s ending, posted on Bleacher Report’s TikTok account, racked up more than 2.7 million views. Another clip, amplified by Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, got 3.4 million views on Twitter/X.

Neither of those videos, of course, showed what Price and his coaches and teammates did in the game’s immediate aftermath. Neither of them showed that Price began to cry, that he pleaded to the umpires for an explanation and didn’t get one. “That’s actually one of the things I was mainly mad about,” he said. “I asked one of the umpires, ‘Sir, what did I do wrong? I’m trying to learn here.’ I don’t know if he just didn’t hear me because the atmosphere was crazy.”

Neither of those videos showed that Kevin Manero, North Penn’s coach, never got an explanation either, because his catcher was lying on the ground and his shortstop was beside himself and by the time he consoled them and got to Price and told him, I put you in there because I trusted you, and I’d do it again, and don’t you forget that, the umpires had left the field. That Price sat in the last row of the team bus for the three-hour-plus ride back to North Penn, that he “didn’t really want to talk to anybody,” he said, and “was putting it all on myself, but my teammates helped me pick my head up. They got me through the bus ride home.”

And no video could provide the essential context, the reasons that Manero trusted Price so much in such a tense situation. No video could tell the entire internet that Price was in his first and only season as a pitcher on North Penn’s varsity staff. That after his sophomore year he had swung a bat so hard during a summer showcase event in Connecticut that he had broken his hip. That it took three to four months of rehab, of walking on crutches and undergoing 90 minutes of daily physical therapy, to get back to the point that he could play junior varsity ball in 11th grade.

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That as a senior he went from “a fringe guy who worked harder than everyone else,” Manero said, to the Knights’ quasi-closer, with a fastball that topped out at just 82 mph but with enough command of his slider and confidence in himself that he never seemed to get nervous. “The need to compete was very important to me,” he said. “If I was going to go down, I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.” That he escaped from a first-and-third-with-one-out jam in an early-season victory over Hazleton. That he squelched a developing rally by Haverford High in the district playoffs by entering in the sixth inning and striking out the first batter he faced. That he already had thrown four shutout innings in the state championship game before heading back out to the mound for the 13th.

“We didn’t lose because of that,” Manero said of the balk. “We had a lot of chances. I told the kids: The higher you rise, the harder you fall. It’s just baseball. It’s just a game.”

Price is doing his best to look at the situation the same way. This fall, he will head to Juniata College, in central Pennsylvania, to play ball and study to become a pharmacist. He is familiar with the archetype of The High School Sports Hero, the guy who peaked when he was 17 or 18 and led his alma mater to a big win, the guy who sits at a bar and tells boring stories about the old days, the guy who never had it that good again.

Price doesn’t want to be the opposite of that cliché, to let what happened on that pitcher’s mound on Friday, June 13, stay with him forever. A state championship shouldn’t necessarily be the best moment of anyone’s life. Now Price has to make sure he doesn’t treat the balk like it’s the worst.

“This is a learning experience,” he said. “I’m very glad I got the opportunity to play in a state championship game. Yeah, it was an event in my life, but as for importance, I wouldn’t really put it up there.”

Sometimes, he said, he goes on Google or Instagram and sees one of those video clips or even a headline: PIAA 6A CHAMPIONSHIP ENDS ON BALK. If there’s an article or a post about the game, about him, he reads it. “I know it’s out there,” he said, “but it hasn’t affected me too much.” Here’s hoping it never does. Here’s hoping that Caleb Price has the stomach, the strength, and the perspective to do the hardest and healthiest thing that a young athlete can do. Here’s hoping he can move on.