The game had ended more than 10 minutes earlier.
A smattering of Georgia Tech fans remained in the stands of Russ Chandler Stadium, staring out onto the diamond as the grounds crew raked the pitching mound and the home-plate area.
Many faces stared blankly. After a joyride of a record-setting regular season, postseason defeat had visited their beloved team once again, this time in most exquisitely painful form.
One diehard stood on a metal bleacher down the third-base line. He wore a yellow bucket hat, a gold Tech T-shirt, blue shorts and sneakers.
He looked out onto the field. He held his chin in his left hand. When a golf cart shuttling Tech players to the postgame news conference drove past, he clapped and thanked them.
Matthew Balte inherited his love for the Yellow Jackets from his father Richard, a Tech grad. They attended all the Jackets’ NCAA Regional and Super Regional games in 2006, when then-coach Danny Hall piloted Tech to its third College World Series trip in school history and second in five years.
Balte lost his dad about 10 years ago. Every Tech game is a memory, he said. His voice caught as he spoke.
This year was bound to be the year the Jackets finally chased away their demons and advanced past the regional round for the first time since that 2006 season. A team infused by the energy and skill of first-year coach James Ramsey and whose powerhouse lineup was quite arguably the nation’s best had to end Tech’s crushing string of 13 consecutive NCAA appearances without a regional title, right?
This wasn’t merely a team that could reach the College World Series but win it. ACC regular-season and tournament titles demonstrated its class, as did its standing as the top-ranked team in Division I in a slew of offensive categories. The Jackets were most deserving of their No. 2 national seed.
And it appeared the wait would finally end after the Jackets won their first two games of the regional on Friday and Saturday and needed just one more win in two chances against Oklahoma to advance.
And yet.
“I think so much of the goodwill and the great playing that had us looking like a national-title contender for four months – a bad day and probably a bad 1 ½ hours, and it’s over,” Balte said.
Sunday, Tech led Oklahoma 8-2 after 3 ½ innings in a game that would have secured the regional title before the bottom fell out in a 15-8 loss.
Monday, in a winner-take-all rematch with the Sooners, Tech showed its championship mettle and offensive might by overcoming a 3-0 second-inning deficit to take a 7-3 lead with the Sooners down to their last nine outs. The Jackets gave back some of the advantage but still led 7-6 and needed just two more outs to exhale.
But Oklahoma tied it up in the bottom of the ninth – by the peculiarities of the NCAA rulebook, the Sooners were the designated home team – and then won it on a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 10th.
After Dayton Tockey’s home run off Tate McKee cleared the center-field fence, some Tech players remained motionless, seemingly unable to process what had just happened. First-team All-ACC second baseman Jarren Advincula took a knee just beyond the infield dirt in right field. Catcher Vahn Lackey, an expected top-10 draft pick, crouched in foul territory in front of Tech’s third-base dugout.
A team stocked with talent had been felled far short of its goal.
Minutes passed before players walked off the field, some betraying no emotion and others with pain across their faces.
Some returned to the field and remained there almost two hours after the game had ended, sunset falling on Midtown and their season.
“It sucks,” All-American and surefire MLB first-round pick Drew Burress said. “No other way to put it. We weren’t good enough (Monday). We had plenty of chances and didn’t do it.”
The shocking defeat evoked the last time Tech had assembled a team with this clear a shot at the College World Series — Hall’s 2019 squad that had earned the No. 3 national seed. That team lost a winner’s bracket game to Auburn on a walk-off home run that derailed its ultimately unsuccessful bid.
Tech suffered that scarring loss seven years ago to the day Monday on the same field.
“Twenty years is a long time,” Balte said. “It almost starts to feel like a curse of some sort.”
After Sunday’s loss to the Sooners, Ramsey assured that “ghosts aren’t real.”
Monday, it was not as easy to believe him.
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