In the aforementioned game against Princeton in which he hit his third home run of the year, Herrmann also took over for injured freshman Jake Bruton, who had taken a line drive to the body and had to leave the contest. The result was 6 2/3 innings of clutch relief pitching against the team Herrmann’s been thinking about ever since that fateful at-bat.

After conceding three early runs, he fanned eight down the stretch, solidifying an 11-7 comeback win he himself helped kick-start with his offense.

It was the second sparkling performance in three opportunities.

“We need his bat, and we also need his arm pitching in these games,” Farkes says. “We’re just going to look for him to keep improving, keep getting better.”

But in truth, Herrmann’s first gem came earlier. It was Harvard’s fourth game of the year, a complete game victory in which he let up only one run and struck out six against an Air Force team which had tagged the Crimson for a startling 20 runs a day earlier.

At the time, conventional wisdom may have chalked it up to a fluke performance.

But now—slowly but surely—the sophomore is proving that Coach Walsh wasn’t so crazy in that rainy New Jersey ballgame almost one year ago.

All he needed was some time.

In a fortunate case of the present vindicating the past, sending Herrmann to the dish for that momentous at-bat—an experience Herrmann has rerun in his mind “100 times” since—may not prove to be the simple foregone conclusion it had turned out to be, after all.

He’s not a greenhorn anymore. The opportunity and the confidence are there.

And if all goes as planned, maybe the end result will finally turn out to be the stuff of dreams.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.