On one rainy Sunday in May 2003, longtime Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh inspected his dwindling bench and called out Frank Herrmann’s name on a wing and a prayer.

The place was Princeton University’s Clarke Field, right in the freshman’s home state.

The situation?

The decisive third game of the Ivy League Championship Series, with each team knotted up at one win apiece.

Ninth inning.

Two on, two out.

Tigers up, 5-2.

The guy on the hill?Princeton’s ace closer Thomas Pauly, the school’s all-time career leader in saves and strikeouts per nine innings. But here—maybe even more importantly—a senior eyeing a complete game four-hitter and his tenth K of the game.

And so out of the visiting dugout climbed Herrmann, the New Jersey native, a relative greenhorn standing on the most pressure-packed stage imaginable with a paltry 15 collegiate at-bats under his belt.

“The guy’s the 51st pick in the [Major League Baseball] draft and I hadn’t had the bat in maybe a month and a half,” Hermann remembers. “The guy’s throwing 95 mph with a slider. It was tough.”

He would whiff for No. 10; the championship would be the Tigers’ third in the past four years.

“He’s got a lot of power,” Walsh would go on to say afterwards. The sophomore currently stands a robust 6’4, 220, good for fourth-tallest on the team and second-heaviest. “If he could get a hold of one and hit it out of the shortest part of the park….

“We were looking for a dream come true up there.”

Well, it’s been awhile since Walsh began searching for that dream. Soon enough, in fact, it’ll be approaching exactly one year ago, to the day.

But with the Crimson (9-9-1, 3-1 Ivy) heading into Friday’s Ivy home opener against Columbia (8-14, 5-3), it seems like some of that saving grace Harvard baseball’s been looking for may have finally arrived.