And then came senior centerfielder Brian Ralph, the man Walsh has called the greatest defensive centerfielder in college baseball. The lefthander--who broke his hand in spring training and still managed to lead the squad in homers and slugging percentage--was the toast of the prestigious Cape Cod summer league.

One can only speculate on what thoughts coursed through Ralph's head as he took two pitches from Tulane reliever Scott Bell. His impending professional career? His shameful 2-for-11 no-show in the Regional up to that point? His near-grand slam that would have tied Game One against Cal State-Fullerton?

Whatever they were, they evanesced as Bell wound up from the stretch, and broke off a hanging breaking ball. Six thousand surrogate fans who had adopted Harvard in the absence of hometown LSU gasped in unison, and Ralph pounced, drilling his team-record 10th home run of the season over the right-centerfield wall while the stadium erupted into its Cajun chant of "Geaux Harvard Geaux!"

11-11 tie. New ballgame. New season. Same old Harvard.

The Laguna Niguel, California native trotted coolly around the basepaths, and even though the Crimson had more work to do, this one was in the bag.

Huling and Binkowski ripped run-scoring singles in the bottom of the eighth off the Green Wave's Craig Brown to stake a 14-11 lead. Junior righthander Donny Jamieson--pitching out of the bullpen after starting much of the season--nailed down his second straight win in relief with one and two-thirds scoreless innings, and the Green Wave was history.

As one of many LSU officials who stopped by to offer their congratulations put it, "Y'all got `bout the scrappiest little team I ever seen."

Let that stand as an epithet, then. Walsh's club stole, bunted, sacrifice flied, hit and ran and, it seemed, positively willed its way to a third-place finish in its second NCAA Regional in as many years.

The Crimson scrapped out a 36-12 record, a No. 24 ranking in the final Associated Press poll and school records in wins, home runs, hits and stolen bases. Not bad for a bunch of upstarts from Cambridge who refused to die.

And although the Crimson fell out of the field with its second loss to eighth-ranked Fullerton in three days, baseball in the Northeast is on the map, courtesy of a gritty, knowledgeable club that won the hearts of the toughest baseball audience in the country.

"The fact that we were one of three teams left standing with LSU and Fullerton says a lot," Walsh said. "Those are programs that have owned the national championship in the last five years. We were fighting for national respect today, to show that we're not only a great school, but that we've got a great baseball team too."

Head of the Class

All season long, the Crimson thrived on the efforts of its seniors. Harvard baseball's class of 1998 was numerically small--four position players and two pitchers--but their playoff experience and their uniformly special years were the glue that kept the Crimson going.

Ralph, Vankoski, captain David Forst, leftfielder Aaron Kessler, relievers Mike Marcucci and John Wells. When these six joined the team in the spring of 1995, they inherited a program that, under part-time Coach Leigh Hogan, struggled through a 10-25 season and looked like the furthest thing imaginable from an NCAA tournament-caliber club.

Walsh's rapid turnaround of the club is a well-documented story, but the role his seniors have played somewhat less so. Of the six, Forst and Marcucci enjoyed career years, while Ralph, Kessler and Vankoski were all honored with All-Ivy distinction.