OMAHA, Neb. — It couldn’t have.
Maybe it shouldn’t have.
But it did. Somehow, it did.
LSU is going back to the College World Series championship series on the back of one of its most improbable victories here ever.
E-V-E-R.
The final score: LSU 6, Arkansas 5.
But this one won’t truly go final for a very long time. It will live on, taking its place alongside LSU’s win in the 1996 CWS final on Warren Morris’ home run. Alongside the Tigers’ win to beat Wake Forest and vault into the CWS final two years ago on Tommy White’s 11th-inning home run.
In fairness to LSU’s 2-0 win over Wake in 2023 — one of the most dramatic pitching duels you could ever hope to see determined by one mighty swing of the bat — this game had much more craziness. Great plays, botched plays, inexplicable plays, many of them by the same players.
“Greatest moment in my life,” LSU coach Jay Johnson said of White’s mammoth blast in 2023. “It’s now tied for first.”
There is so much to sift through, it could fill a book.
But there is one salient, important point that rises above all: LSU will play for its eighth CWS championship starting Saturday against Coastal Carolina.
Perhaps by then the buzz over this one will have died down, but I doubt it.
I hope in their delirious celebrations that some LSU fans took time to go across the street from Charles Schwab Field to Rocco’s and poured out at least one Jell-O shot for star-crossed Arkansas. The poor little rich Razorbacks. They were quite arguably the best team in the nation this year, and definitely the best program not named Florida State to never win a College World Series.
But they lost four of five to the Tigers overall this season, including Saturday’s 4-1 LSU victory in their CWS opener. Arkansas is now 0-5 in Omaha against LSU as well, where it packs another gut-punch of a defeat into its suitcase for the flight home to Fayetteville on Thursday. They will have to try to bury this one in the ground next to the missed pop foul that cost the Hogs the 2018 CWS title against Oregon State.
It's a wondrous game, college baseball, especially here on its biggest stage. It can be brutal as well.
Absolutely brutal.
“It was a lot of heartbreak,” Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said.
Twice, no three times, it looked like Arkansas had LSU marked for defeat and would force a winner-take-all game Thursday for a berth in the CWS final.
The first was on Ryder Helfrick’s solo home run in the fourth off LSU starter Zac Cowan. Nearly forgotten Zac Cowan, who summoned up a gutsy starter’s performance with 5⅓ innings of one-run ball. LSU finally broke through on pinch-hitter Jake Brown’s two-run single in the sixth.
After Arkansas reclaimed the lead in the eighth, Jared Jones tied it with a “the Oscar goes to” dramatic, two-out, 398-foot, first-pitch homer. But just as quickly as it left the yard it looked like it would go for naught as Arkansas' nine-hole hitter Justin Thomas zipped a two-run single to left through a drawn-in infield for a 5-3 Razorbacks lead in the top of the ninth.
Foolish mortals we, thinking that all the fuses had been lit on all the fireworks this game had stored up.
Frankly, no one had seen anything yet.
Arkansas had a chance to end it on a ground ball to short by LSU shortstop Steven Milam. But Arkansas’ Wehiwa Aloy, the Southeastern Conference player of the year, inexplicably went to third to force out Derek Curiel instead of turning what appeared to be a fairly routine double play. A second out, yes, but LSU still had life.
Maybe nine lives.
It seemed that way as catcher Luis Hernandez hit a dying line drive to left that bounced off the shoulder of left fielder Charles Davalan, who appeared to slip while trying to make a play. That tied it 5-5, driving in Ethan Frey from second and Milam from first.
Then, the coup de grace. With Hernandez at second, Jones smashed a single that ticked off the top of second baseman Cam Kozeal’s glove and fell into the no man’s land of shallow center field. That would be Omaha native Cam Kozeal, adding insult to injury. Hernandez motored home standing up and the Tigers went berserk.
Jones went somewhere else.
“I thought he had caught it honestly because it fell in behind him,” Jones said. “Once I saw the ball hit the grass, I blacked out.
“Super grateful.”
Why did Aloy go for the force on Curiel? Why did Arkansas pitch to Jones, who has had plenty of strikeouts in the CWS but also two massive home runs?
Second-guessers of the world unite. But the truth is while Arkansas made mistakes and controversial decisions, LSU committed an uncharacteristically high three errors, including one by Jones who dropped what could have been a double play that helped Arkansas score to go up 3-2 in the top of the eighth.
But somehow the Tigers rallied from behind three times. In the end, the Razorbacks ran out of answers.
An ESPN reporter stuck a microphone in Jones’ face right after it ended, hoping he could find some way to describe the indescribable.
“It’s LSU baseball,” he said. “The most magical three years of my life. It’s unbelievable.”
That, all of it, happens to be true.
