Lucas: Someday

By Adam Lucas

Someday they will do it.

There are no guarantees and I don't know when, but I believe that someday North Carolina will win the NCAA baseball championship.

It won't be this year. Oklahoma took care of that, winning Monday's decisive championship series game, 13-2. After a middling regular season, the Sooners were spectacular throughout the NCAA Tournament, and showed it again on Monday.

And so the Tar Heels end the season as the second-best squad out of 304 Division I college baseball teams.

Again.

As you know if you're on this page, Carolina also came this close in 2006 and 2007, and there have been six other trips to the College World Series in the last two decades that ended short of the championship series.

You think you're frustrated? In those 20 years, the baseball program has spent approximately 81 nights in Omaha chasing this goal—more than two full months. That's a lot of whiskey filets and a lot of watching other teams celebrate on the field, yet they keep doing it.

This year alone, hundreds of players and staff and family members put everything on hold for the better part of June to try and make this the year. They played hurt and balanced books with baseball and went to bed early while their friends were going to Franklin Street, just so you could have another couple of weeks to yell at the TV.

College sports can be a little wearying in 2026. The baseball program does one of the best jobs on campus of making it fun again. By nature of where it falls on the calendar, it also does an impressive job of rejuvenating the fan base for the next school year. No matter how frustrated you are with the transfer portal or NIL or any number of very defensible reasons, watching the Tar Heels play baseball in this era feels like why you started watching Carolina sports in the first place.

The craziest thing about the college baseball universe is that while the Tar Heels were in Omaha, the coaching staff was already actively working on the transfer portal for the 2027 roster. One day we'll look back and wonder why the calendar was allowed to be structured this way.

But that's how you build a program these days. And although Carolina has not yet won that elusive national championship, the Tar Heels have proven to be very, very good at building a program. It started with Mike Fox and continues with Scott Forbes, and there were reminders everywhere in Omaha over the last ten days.

Over the weekend, over 60 UNC lettermen put their lives on hold and found a way to Omaha to watch the Tar Heels. On Sunday morning, they assembled at the team hotel to take a group picture.

This wasn't a long-scheduled reunion that they'd had a chance to plan for months. This was a spur of the moment decision by dozens of Tar Heel baseball players who wanted to pay tribute to the people and the program who have been such an important part of their lives.

There were wives and kids and hugs for teammates they hadn't seen in too long. Fox told all the assembled kids to get in the photo for a moment; when Levi and Hayley Michael's young daughter, Chloe, came running up at the last second, she was greeted with a giant cheer from the 60 uncles she didn't know she had.

Fox is still a coach, even when he's only coaching photo coordination. He organized the group and put all the former players in the right place, which is tougher than you might think when you're trying to corral a group of alumni who are busy trying to catch up.

Before the final photo was snapped, Fox turned to the group. He wanted to take just a moment to tell them what it all meant to him, that he'd spent his life trying to win games and get to this place but most importantly, to build this exact thing right here—something that mattered to him and mattered to them and felt like home to everybody no matter where they gathered.

He has spent his entire life in front of these people. He knows what to say, knows exactly how to do it.

But he couldn't tell them, because the tears were coming. So he just looked at all of them and put his hand on his heart.

"This is what Carolina Baseball is all about," he said. "This is so special."

There were a half-dozen or more representatives from the 2006 team that is the only other roster in UNC history to get within one game of a national championship. Andrew Carignan and Chad Flack and Jonathan Hovis and Daniel Bard were there, not because they wanted to relive strikeouts or base hits, but because they just wanted to be teammates again.

Sooner than they expect, it will be Jason DeCaro and Gavin Gallaher and Owen Hull in that group picture. They'll be the old guys watching the new Tar Heels, and they will tell stories that might need a little fact-checking. They'll sit in the stands and agonize over every pitch and they're absolutely going to reminisce about the year they won 53 games.

This program will end up being one of the formative pillars of their lives. They're too hurt to know it right now, but over the next months and especially years, they're going to cherish what happened here. One day they'll tell so many stories about Omaha that their kids will get tired of hearing it, until at some point they come to the Midwest as a family and then they understand. This type of program seems normal to us but it's not. There have been better teams during these 20 years, and Oklahoma earned the right to be called the best this year. But the best testament to the program is that this year's players will go out into the baseball world and realize their college experience was different than almost everyone else they meet.

It's completely reasonable if you've been watching UNC baseball for 20 years and you're frustrated. So were Tar Heel fans in 1981 when Dean Smith lost in yet another Final Four, and many of us were too busy paying attention to on-court results to see the foundation of something that would become one of our most proud assets—the Carolina family.

But 1982 was pretty sweet. And when it finally happens on the diamond, it will be for the team and coaching staff that does it. But it will also be for everyone who came before them, for a program that has become a family and for those who will wake up on Tuesday morning profoundly disappointed but still convinced that it's going to happen—someday.

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