CHATHAM, Mass. — “Leave the clothes alone!” a woman demands, because someone has to be the voice of reason, even in those exceptional circumstances where the public has reason to lose all sense of reason.

The circumstance, in this case, would be a walk-off solo home run from Georgia infielder Junior Lauaki, a blast that sealed Chatham’s (11-14-2, East) 4-3 win over Bourne (13-11-3, West) and sent the Veterans Field crowd into a frenzy on this Thursday evening. The public, in this case, would be that aforementioned Veterans Field crowd, featuring dozens of children who all want a piece of the man of the hour, Lauaki, as he stands on the grass beside the third-base dugout.

“Not the belt,” Lauaki says to a clamoring kid, having already given away both of his batting gloves and his batting sleeve. “I need the belt.”

Just minutes ago, he stood at home plate, facing Bourne reliever Connor Lehman (Alabama) with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Chatham was tied 3-3 then, having just given up the game-tying run to the Braves an inning ago. The Anglers had lost each of their last five games, and if someone wasn’t going to be the hero, that streak very well could’ve extended to six.

But none of that matters now. These kids, the kinds of fans who will tell stories about this night years from now; this win, the kinds of wins Chatham needs to cement its playoff position; this moment, the kind which doesn’t repeat itself — that’s all that matters tonight. The rest can wait.

“I felt like the moment, like that, was at Oregon,” Lauaki said. “I mean, doing it on the whole opposite side of the country now is kind of surreal to me.”

The fastball came, and he knew it was gone as soon as it touched his bat. He didn’t even have to look, but he did anyway, just to marvel in his own glory. About four seconds pass from contact to trot to bat flip, and his eyes don’t leave the right-field hill for the entirety of it.

Look at it go.

Seriously. Look. Cook said Thursday was a night where the baseball wasn’t carrying particularly well — the A’s had zero extra-base hits before Lauaki’s blast, for what it’s worth — and Lauaki still put the ball halfway up the right-field berm.

The ball before that should’ve gone, too. He knew it. He just barely missed the pitch before, and looked at the A’s dugout immediately after he fouled it off, smiling. His teammates smiled back at him, and as they looked at one another, it was almost as if both parties knew something that nobody else did.

“I felt like I was about to do it to that one,” Lauaki said.

But he did it to the next one, as if he could control a ball’s fate with sheer will. That’s what “big league power” looks like, as Anglers manager Dennis Cook would say, the kind that convinced him that Lauaki was worth taking a flyer on. He said he doesn’t like recruiting pure “power hitters” to Chatham. A lot of them, he says, just have “aluminum bat” power, the kind that doesn’t translate nearly as well to the wooden bats of the Cape Cod Baseball League.

“He's got tremendous power,” Cook said. “It's real. The power is real.”

Of course it is. Lauaki wouldn’t have 14 home runs as a freshman in the Big Ten unless his power was real, even with aluminum bats, but it’s nice to have visual confirmation. This isn’t anything new for him, either. He’s been displaying it all week long, too, even amid Chatham’s losing streak.

“Those kinds of guys like (Lauaki) are few and far between,” Cook said postgame.

The first blast came on July 12, in the A’s 5-4 loss to Orleans. It was also at Veterans Field, but unlike Thursday’s, that one soared over the center field fence. The second one came on July 16, in the Anglers’ 6-2 defeat to Hyannis. This one was at McKeon Park, and unlike Thursday’s, it went over the left field fence instead. With his walk-off blast against the Braves, Lauaki had officially hit a home run to all three parts of the field in a four-day span.

None of them were wall-scrapers.

“Now that I've been here for a week, I think I'm settled all in,” Lauaki said. “(My) swing feels really great.”

It’s nice that he’s settled in, because this is the preliminary bout; the main event comes this weekend. The venue is Harwich’s Whitehouse Field, and the occasion is the Cape Cod Baseball League’s Home Run Hitting Contest. Lauaki was extended an invitation to the event just three days into his time in Chatham, well before he had actually even hit a home run.

“I showed up on Saturday morning, ‘You're in the home run derby,’” Lauaki recalled. “I'm like, ‘I've been here three days, and I don't even have a home run yet.’”

It was a gamble. There was a very real possibility that Lauaki’s admittedly “rough start” continued into the All-Star break, and he walked into Whitehouse Field armed with zero home runs under his belt and a swing that wasn’t feeling “really good.”

But that decision is far from a gamble now. It’s just like a Lauaki blast.

Zero room for doubt.

“I'm ready,” Lauaki said. “I think I can see myself coming out with a win on Saturday.”