It’s been an odd season of Harvard baseball. Writers tend to cling to a sort of season-long narrative of sorts as storylines crop up and develop. In Mager’s final year, for example, a relentlessly tough senior class willed the team to victory down the stretch behind the rubber arm of Ben Crockett ’02. The clichés were easy to latch on to. Everything flowed.

This was a more disjointed year—exciting, certainly, but nowhere near as tailor made to fit. There was adversity overcome, surely, with more physical pieces bruised and dented than a garden-variety Pinto. There were individual heroes and an exciting cast of newcomers—names like Klimkiewicz, Farkes, Brunnig and Salsgiver will grace these pages for years to come—and there were pressing, constant problems, like the infield’s downright scary propensity for misplaying grounders. But in the midst of all of this was very little to cling to and run with from a fan or writer’s standpoint. Obvious talent. Win some. Lose some. It was very difficult to bring into focus was this season was about.

The Herrmann moment provided a measure of clarity. The season was about the potential of the next at-bat, the next start, the next guy to get the call, about whether freshmen like Javier Castellanos and Morgan Brown could be thrown into the fire and pitch well in the most important innings of their young careers and about whether Klimkiewicz could bring home a couple of runs with two outs. Usually they did. Sometimes they didn’t. The result was a pretty good season. It’s nowhere near as incongruous as it seems.

Next year, they’ll likely get it done more often. There will be more moments for the Frank Herrmanns of the world—and yes, Frank Herrmann himself—to pen. There will be more moments for the Magers and Ronzs to live again. And the string of moments when the certainty of the clouds is defied will be, perhaps, a little more narrative-friendly.

“And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me,” Charles Dickens writes. In baseball, the mists rise solemnly and with little warning, and if they don’t today they can tomorrow or next year, and this is its grace.

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu.