Exactly 26 years ago today, Bend High’s baseball team wrote the final chapter of a classic small-school Cinderella story.

The plucky Lava Bears from rural Central Oregon — Bend’s population then was just 18,450 — traveled to big-city Portland and upset No. 2-ranked Tigard, then the third-largest school in the state, 5-1 at Civic Stadium in the 1987 AAA baseball state final.

It was Bend High’s first — and remains the school’s only — state baseball championship.

“Back then, when the town was a lot smaller, it was a big deal,” says T.J. Hurd, 43, who was a reserve senior outfielder for the Bears’ 1987 squad. “We beat a bunch of top-ranked teams, and then had to play a Portland school in the final. … It was a long time ago, but boy was it fun.”

All those years later, Bend is back in the state final. The Lava Bears who have not made a baseball championship appearance since their momentous 1987 season, play Sherwood today at 1:30 p.m. at Volcanoes Stadium in Keizer for the Class 5A state title.

Of course, no current Bend player was even alive during the Bears’ last championship run. But that does not mean the 2013 team will be without a little bit of 1987 charm.

In fact, this year’s team has more than a few connections with its brothers from another era.

After playing on Bend’s first title team, Hurd is now a proud papa Bear with a son, Dalton, making significant contributions to this year’s squad.

The younger Hurd, a junior, hits third in the batting order and plays third base. In three postseason games this year he has four hits in 11 turns at bat and has driven in five runs, all while playing flawless in the field.

“That’s one of the best memories of his life, winning state,” Dalton Hurd says about his dad. “He’s really excited and hopes that happens to me, too. He wants me to live that moment because it’s one of his favorites.”

Guiding the Lava Bears this season is Bret Bailey, a longtime Bend High football and baseball assistant coach in his 30th year with the school. Now in his second year as head baseball coach, Bailey was the Lava Bears’ junior varsity coach from 1985 to 1995 and was an assistant under Bend head coach Elmer Groener during that magical 1987 season.

“We’ve got good tradition here,” says Bailey, who in his two seasons as head coach has compiled a record of 38-17 and has taken Bend to back-to-back state semifinal appearances. “You always have your up and down years, like any school, but we seem to be in the thick of it most of the time.

“The expectations are always there,” adds Bailey, whose Bears are 20-8 this season and have won 15 of their last 17 games. “We’re kind of a blue-collar school; we like hard work. We’re nothing fancy, nothing flashy. We just like to play ball, that’s it.”

While Bailey has seen both Bend High state finalist clubs from the dugout, assistant coach Dave Williams is experiencing this postseason run as a coach after hitting leadoff for the ’87 Bears. By all accounts a freakishly good athlete in his youth — he played shortstop in high school, an oddity for a left-hander, and went on to play center field at Oregon State — Williams had two hits, scored one run and batted in another in the 1987 title game.

“That was so long ago,” says Williams, who spent 13 seasons as head baseball coach at rival Mountain View High from 1998 to 2010. “It’s a different day and age now. But these are high-character kids who’ll do anything you ask of them. They had some success last year, got a little taste of it in the semifinals (Bend lost 3-2 in 10 innings to eventual champion Wilson), and want to finish it off this year.”

This spring’s Lava Bears team is even tied to Tigard, the program Bend beat for the title in 1987. Brandon Sunitsch, currently an assistant with the Bend High freshman team, played in the Lava Bears’ program as a freshman and sophomore in 1985 and 1986, but his family moved to the Portland area before his junior year. Sunitsch, who went by Brandon Woodruff in high school before taking his adoptive father’s last name, attended — you guessed it — Tigard High, and played against his Central Oregon buddies in the 1987 championship game, scoring the Tigers’ lone run.

“If we had to lose a baseball game, (Bend was) the only team I was OK losing to,” recalls Sunitsch, who as a senior the following season helped Tigard win the state crown. “T.J. (Hurd) and me, we grew up playing together. We were competing for JV spots back in sophomore year. It’s kind of cool to see him and his son around, and I’ve got my own son out there. (Jordan Sunitsch is a freshman.)

“There’s a ton of history rolling around out there and it’s coming full circle,” Sunitsch adds. “It’s pretty cool.”