Lucas: Starting Here

By Adam Lucas

It all started in 2006.

Everything you know as Carolina baseball: the regular trips to Omaha, the postseason success, the upgraded stadium, the swelling crowds—it all goes back to 20 years ago.

The program was very different then. Jonathan Hovis was a one-man senior class in 2006, and entering the year he had never played a postseason game in Chapel Hill. By that point in his tenure, he and the Tar Heels had played NCAA Tournament games in Columbia (two trips), Starkville and Gainesville. The Heels were simply the appetizer other programs gobbled up on their way to the College World Series.

Until 2006. Until the Tar Heels went to the heart of SEC country in Tuscaloosa, watched Andrew Miller dominate on Friday night and then played one of the most memorable games in Carolina athletics history—yes, Carolina athletics history, not just Carolina baseball history—the next evening.

That's when Chad Flack homered to put the Heels ahead 5-4 in the eighth, the Crimson Tide shockingly took the lead back in the top of the ninth and then Flack won the game with a blast to right in the bottom of the ninth.

Before he went to the plate, Flack turned to then-pitching coach Scott Forbes and said, "We're not losing this game." (The actual quote may have included a couple of other colorful adjectives.)

That quote should be on a plaque somewhere. It accurately summarized the perfect team with the perfect players at the perfect time. In 2006, we weren't quite in the social media and cell phone era just yet (the iPhone was released in June of 2007). So in 2006, after the team returned to their Tuscaloosa hotel, they crammed together in the lobby to try and catch a few seconds of UNC baseball highlights on SportsCenter.

Those moments likely wouldn't happen today. They'd all have seen the home run—and laughed at all the surrounding hilarity, like Miller sprinting in from the bullpen and Matt Danford brandishing his lucky wiffle ball bat—on their phones as soon as the game ended.

Instead, they saw it the same way they seemed to do everything: together. They won but they also did it in a way that was infectious. They'd sign autographs after the game and high-five Little League teams and then go win 50 games. This wasn't just some bunch of overachieving ragamuffins. There were seven future major leaguers on that 2006 team and several others who didn't make the bigs but are among the best players Carolina has ever had at their positions. None of them, however, acted like it.

And with all due respect to the terrific teams that came after 2006, there was something very special about that first College World Series trip.

That's because no one had any expectations at all. No one had ever done anything like it, except for Mike Fox (a player on the 1978 team). No one knew how much fun it was going to be to get a milkshake from Zesto's and eat a whiskey filet at the Drover and go to the zoo and walk in during the opening ceremonies and ride the bus to Rosenblatt and see the bleacher general admission fans lined up down the hill and watch the beach balls bounce around the outfield and eat a Kong burger and…

And that was just the first couple of days.

It's a safe bet every one of those players who returned on Saturday to be honored before third-ranked Carolina's 14-4 run-rule win over second-ranked Georgia Tech—including Hovis throwing out the ceremonial first pitch to Tim Federowicz—has vivid memories of those nearly two weeks in Omaha. Between them, those reunion attendees brought 44 kids with them back to Chapel Hill. Those kids should know: those stories your dad has told you are all (mostly) true.

"What we're hoping to do," Andrew Carignan said on Friday, "is wear the kids out at the game during the day and then let the dads hang out on Saturday night." (There will be many more 2006 memories during a Carolina Insider 20th anniversary special episode in the weeks to come, so now would be a good time to subscribe.)

In addition to playing some very good baseball, the 2006 team also did something else: they changed everything. The Boshamer Stadium attendance on roughly this same day in 2006 was 2,351, and we thought that was a fantastic crowd. The Boshamer Stadium attendance on Friday night against Tech was a record-breaking 4,357, not counting the swarms of people outside the stadium gates.

Everything is different now. The 2006 team lost two straight games at the ACC Tournament in Jacksonville and boarded a bus for an eight-hour drive home. The Diamond Heels take charter flights almost everywhere now. In the days before the '06 Heels hosted an NCAA regional, the pitchers were assigned to scrub the padding around the stadium. Walker McDuffie isn't scrubbing any padding.

And every perk McDuffie and the Heels have today, every new piece of gear or ESPN appearance or shred of national respect, can be traced to 2006. They got closer to a national championship than any Carolina baseball team in history. And when the Tar Heels eventually break through and win it all in Omaha (with Saturday's win, these Heels now have the second-best 40-game start in program history) the 2006 team will celebrate just as hard—OK, some of them will celebrate harder—than anyone else. Because they know, just like the rest of us do, that the modern era of this program started with them.

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