Monday, June 04, 2007
They won!!
Michigan baseball! They won Regionals!
I know nobody who reads this cares, but eeeeeeee! First time since 1989! They had to beat NUMBER ONE RANKED Vanderbilt.... twice! And, goodness, they did! They lost the middle game, but it was unlikely that they were going to make it out of this round, because, you know... Vanderbilt! Ranked number one in the country! And Michigan DID make it out of the round, they're on to the Super Regionals, and Vanderbilt... now they've fallen to THE WOLVERINES!
I saw that the game was tied 3-3 in the 9th, but I couldn't watch the little online stat-tracker thing because I was a) too nervous and b) afraid of jinxing it. I know, I KNOW how irrational that is, but the one game I tried to follow on the stat tracker was the one they lost, so. No more checking. It was all I could do to restrict myself to that small glance in the 9th. And just now I thought that surely the game must be over, it should be safe to check again, and it was over, and we'd won!
For those of you who don't follow NCAA baseball, Michigan "won" the Big 10 regular season, coming out of it with the best record. They lost the Big 10 Championship to Ohio State, though, and thus were not assured a spot in the NCAA tourney. They received an at-large bid, though, which was right and proper because they had been the highest-ranked Big 10 team on the national boards throughout the year (in fact, they might have been the only Big 10 team to be nationally ranked... but don't quote me on that, I think Minnesota might have been on there too).
Michigan fans were grateful to see them in the tourney at all. Anything beyond that was assumed to be gravy.
They were matched up against Memphis first, which seemed a tough battle because the tourney is in Tennessee and Memphis then should have a home field advantage. No such luck, though, and Michigan beat them only to suddenly find themselves scheduled to face an even more fearsome opponent in Vanderbilt.
Whom they defeated! The middle game, which Michigan lost, even that wasn't some kind of insane Vandy blowout, like one would maybe expect from the nominally best team in the nation. It was a 10-7 score, and Michigan had come back from a 6-2 deficit, I believe. But the Wolverines won the first game, and they just now won the last game in extra innings, sending me into a series of overwhelmingly happy squees.
SQUEE!
Opponents to be announced for the Super Regionals... I guess we have to wait to see who wins the other games and whatnot before we know who Michigan plays next. In any event, the team's already done more than most people expected them to do, and it is nothing short of painfully exciting.Labels: baseball, college baseball, NCAA, win, Wolverines
10:53 PM
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