Between the heat and the tight score, you can’t blame Cooper pitcher Griffin Smith for thinking the victory at Totino-Grace felt more late June than early May.

But if that was the Hawks’ first taste of postseason-type baseball, the future looks encouraging.

On an unusually humid Tuesday afternoon, when strikeouts piled up on both sides like cashed water bottles, Smith outlasted his counterpart to boost Cooper to a 2-0 victory in a North Suburban Conference game.

The ace — whom coach Tim Palm refers to as a “onesie” along with co-ace Taylor Schumacher — threw a complete game, giving up five hits, walking one and striking out 10.

“That was playoff baseball we were playing,” said Smith, who is now 4-0 and has gone at least six innings in all of his starts. “I wasn’t going to give in.”

He certainly didn’t, but with the way his mound opponent — Totino-Grace’s Benjamin Meyer — was tossing, Smith needed the critical fourth inning his offense gave him.

After Larson got eight strikeouts through the first three innings (he finished with 12 in 6 innings), the Hawks were able to put together three line drives to right field — the last of which, from Jesse Jennings, scored two.

Palm was relieved, thinking it would be a tight game from the start. He had unsuccessfully tried to execute a suicide squeeze to try to score in the first inning.

The Eagles responded in the bottom of the inning with their own rally. The middle of the order got three consecutive hits and nearly scored, but Marcus O’Neil was thrown out at the plate.

“That was huge,” Palm said. “Those are the little things we work on in practice, but even then we only execute them about 80 percent of the time.”

Afterward, Totino-Grace coach Mike Smith stood by the choice to wave his man home.

“That was probably the best chance that we had,” he said. “They made a good play.”