According to Good News Network, the Dartmouth High School Spartans from Nova Scotia have not won a baseball game in six years, yet the team's spirits remain as high as ever.

Team captain Curtis Snelgrove told CBC News, as reported by GNN, that the Spartans are "mercied" — meaning opponents score 10 runs in a certain number of innings — "probably 80% of the time." Even so, he insists that "everyone has a blast on the team, we have a great time!"

For these baseball-mad young men, the chance to lace up their cleats, pull on the jersey, and paint their cheeks black is what keeps them showing up season after season.

The surprise here is the reversal: a high school team with a losing record of almost perfect consistency should, by any conventional measure, be a story of failure.

Instead, GNN's report describes a roster that trains hard, fielding grounders and pop flies, and doesn't look like a team that loses most games by the mercy rule. The reason is that the Spartans have no performance standards, which means there are no barriers to joining.

Many players had never had the chance to play their favorite sport before, so simply taking the field is the reward — even when it entails facing a 10-run deficit by the third inning.

GNN reports that player Alex Ansems had never played baseball before joining the Spartans and made up for his lack of hitting, pitching, and fielding by being a "vibes guy" who pumped the team up.

Those good vibes carried the boys through six winless seasons — and weren't even dampened when the team's female players broke off, formed their own team, joined the women's league, and won the first-ever game for Dartmouth High baseball.

"It was pretty awesome to see that Spartans baseball won a game, even if it wasn't my team," teammate Benjamin Boehner told the outlet, showing there is no trash talk at Dartmouth about playing ball like a girl.

Good News Network frames the Spartans' persistence as a life lesson in action: the players know that losing is part of life, and that is exactly why they keep taking the field year after year, jokingly hoping one day someone worse will come along.

The story lands in a broader tradition of teams that connect with fans despite the scoreline.

The Daily Wire, in a nostalgia column by Sport & State's Jason Foster, recalls the late-1980s Atlanta Braves losing 106 games in 1988 yet building a fiercely loyal national following through TBS broadcasts — and then delivering a worst-to-first 1991 season that drew around 1.5 million households per game in September.

Winning is wonderful; belonging can matter more.