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OMAHA | The stage that holds the team that just won the College World Series is wide and takes up a substantial section of the Charles Schwab Field infield.
Amid the red and blue confetti after Ole Miss’ 4-2 win over Oklahoma to sweep the series and claim the school’s first baseball national championship, the stage was assembled in minutes, and it held all the Rebels — elevating over the playing surface and symbolizing Ole Miss’ place in the sport.
And that’s fitting since so many moments brought them here, moments when stars such as Tim Elko, tournament Most Outstanding Player Dylan DeLucia and Hunter Elliott delivered key plays and efforts to keep the Rebels afloat, but also others when lesser-known players helped put all the past scar tissue to bed, proverbially throwing it in the Missouri River that flows minutes from the stadium.
“We've had great leadership, as I mentioned earlier, and just to watch them do this -- I shared with them, and I said it several times now, life is tough, and there's bad things that happen to everybody,” Mike Bianco said. “Good people, bad things happen.
“These guys have worked really hard, and I think they've shown a lot of people that you can fall down, you can stumble and you can fail, but that doesn't mean you're a failure. If you continue to work hard, you continue to push and you continue to believe, as Tim said, you can accomplish anything.
It was 27 days ago when Ole Miss got a reprieve from the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee and a No. 3 seed in the Coral Gables Regional. The elation when Ole Miss flashed on the ESPN broadcast was genuine and euphoric. The Rebels weren’t done, and for the first time in a month, had a level playing field.
The last at-large team in the field, the Rebels ran off seven straight wins, sweeping the regional and the Hattiesburg Super Regional and winning the first two games in the College World Series.
Then, after a one-run gut punch to Arkansas on Wednesday, the Rebels ran off three more victories, slaying the Razorbacks and putting away the Sooners twice in front of more than 20,000 Ole Miss fans among the announced 25 and change officially counted.
It was 55 days since Ole Miss got on the bus in Fayetteville and were 7-14 in the SEC, needing to win seven of the final nine league games to have a realistic chance at NCAA inclusion. They did just that and closed the season winning 18 of their final 22 including 10 of 11 in the NCAA Tournament and five of six in the College World Series.
TJ McCants stood on the field in championship shirt and cap, speaking of the team needing a spark late — one he started with a single in the eighth inning that eventually featured three runs that delivered the championship.
“We were all doing our part to get it done,” McCants said, uttering what seems like a cliche, but it’s the point.
McCants has had four hits in 11 games, but one came with a two-run home run that put the Rebels ahead on Saturday and the single Sunday started the rally, as McCants reaching ran Oklahoma starter Cade Horton and paved the way for Ole Miss to rally against closer Trevin Michael.
John Gaddis, who deferred medical school and transferred from Texas A&M Corpus Christi because he wanted to play in the College World Series, was the winning pitcher after a key strikeout kept Ole Miss within a run in the seventh inning before he got three more outs in the eighth.
Jacob Gonzalez was 0-for-12 the past three games but had three of Ole Miss’ six hits on Sunday, including a solo home run in the sixth to start the scoring and the eighth-inning single that scored McCants to tie the game.
Justin Bench, recognizing the hole on the right side because McCants was stealing, shot a single through to set up Gonzalez and put the go-ahead run on base. Two wild pitches pushed the final two runs across.
Brandon Johnson blew Oklahoma away in the ninth inning to end the game and the championship season. Elliott lasted 6.2 innings in the start to cap at postseason at 25.1 innings and only four earned runs.
The paragraphs could go on from DeLucia’s heroics twice in Omaha to Jack Dougherty’s start on Saturday. Elko is the heartbeat of the Rebels; DeLucia even called him his mentor following the game.
It was a deep, contributing roster that brought the Rebels the title, and so many took a turn making the play to keep the season alive. From the back-to-back sweeps to Missouri and LSU to the confidence and dominance in the NCAA Tournament, Ole Miss didn’t let the season end prematurely or cast doubt over the opportunity that existed.
The Rebels scored more than half their runs in the CWS with two outs and were 0-for-20 on the season when trailing after seven innings before three eighth-inning runs blew away the Sooners.
“To win and to move on, you need the guys that maybe nobody was expecting,” Bianco said. “On media day they weren't the guys that were in all the photo shoots and all of that. Again, they don't have to be the MVP of the tournament. Sometimes they are, but you've got to have different pieces or different ones on different nights.
“That's how you get here, because it takes all of them. You just can't -- you've got to lean on your stars, but man, you need the other parts to come through for you.”
Ole Miss was No. 5 in the preseason and No. 1 in March. Yes, April was awful, and it took a long time to figure out the pitching and juggle the lineup to an optimal order. Things were bleak and anxious, and the space for in-fighting was evident at times.
But this isn’t Cinderella. It’s a team that played together, hung together through hell and communicated in a pivotal team meeting in early May prior to the run, airing out any issues and leaving the room as a solitary group.
Ole Miss got hot, played its best baseball when it mattered and took turns making the plays to keep moving forward. The Rebels, at the end of the season, were the best team in then country and the team playing the best baseball in the country.
Sure, there are stars, but the legacy and the reason are the cohesion — the bonds and perseverance and the playing for each other when things clicked.
All on the stage. All national champions.
