Cancer stricken 13-month-old Shane O’Donnell rested comfortably in his father’s arms as the two made their way from the third-base dugout onto Kean University’s baseball field.

The Cougars – creating a makeshift path for the duo to walk through by forming two parallel lines – began a rhythmic clap and an accompanying chant of “Keep fighting Shane.”

The three words are a familiar chorus for Shane, who repeatedly watched an inspirational video containing them that student-athletes from 11 sports teams at the college made and posted to YouTube earlier this month.

“I played it for him in the hospital,” Shane’s father, Mike, who was a four-year starting shortstop at Kean University from 2001-04, said of the video. “He hears his name, he’s clapping and smiling and getting real excited.”

Emboldened by the rallying cry, which both Shane’s family and the Kean University baseball program have adopted, Mike O’Donnell – who is now the athletics director at Middlesex High School, where he built the Blue Jays into a state Group I baseball power – inched closer to home plate for a brief ceremony prior to Sunday’s game.

“Recently,” Kimberly DeRitter, the college’s director of sports information announced over the public address system at Jim Hynes ’63 Baseball Stadium, “the Kean family has joined an off-field battle for Shane O’Donnell. Even though he is just 1, Shane has already proven what a fighter he can be as he is battling Stage IV cancer.”

O’Donnell’s return to his alma mater came just two days after Shane was discharged from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia following a month-long stay during which he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma.

Mike and his wife, Tina, who gave birth to the couple’s third child just four days after Shane was admitted to the hospital on Jan. 19, brought Shane home on Friday, the first day the entire O’Donnell clan, including daughters Brielle, age 3, and newborn Alexa, were able to be together as one family under the same roof.

“This (return home),” O’Donnell said, “is just a stop off before the next round (of chemotherapy) and in preparation of other things to come.”

After two rounds of chemotherapy – multiple complications of which followed the first – Shane faces “a long road ahead,” O’Donnell said, “probably a 12- to 14-month process if everything goes well.”

At least two more rounds of chemotherapy in the hospital loom for Shane, whose body is riddled with tumors, as well as surgery to remove the largest growth, which is in his abdomen.

Shane returned home on a nasogastric feeding tube, which carries food to the stomach with the assistance of a pump. He receives a daily injection and will gradually be weaned off six medications. Shane is relearning to walk and regaining strength. Blood tests and visits to the ophthalmologist, who monitors the tumors behind Shane’s eyes, will become routine for the 13-month-old.

“To continue the chemotherapy treatments, he is going to have to keep gaining weight and growing and developing like a normal boy,” O’Donnell said, noting that Shane is thriving back home. “He’s enjoying being home, playing with his sisters. He’s a big brother, now, so he’s having fun with the baby. It’s nice to see him being a kid and not connected to wires at both sides of his crib. We’re kind of getting back in the swing of things.”