UNC baseball walks off on West Virginia in Game 1 of Chapel Hill Super Regional

It has been six long years since North Carolina reached Omaha, Nebraska, and the College World Series, and that’s something of a drought for a college baseball program that had become accustomed to competing on the sport’s greatest stage. The Tar Heels appeared in the College World Series seven times between 2006 and 2018, but they haven’t been back since.

If they return this year they’ll owe it to no shortage of late-game magic that has propelled them throughout this NCAA Tournament — the kind that struck again Friday night in the bottom of the ninth, just when the odds of a UNC victory were starting to grow longer and longer. With how the Tar Heels have been winning of late, though, perhaps they were right where they wanted to be.

UNC trailed by a run entering its half of the ninth inning, and faced the specter of losing the first game of a best-of-three Super Regional against West Virginia. The Mountaineers, buoyed by timely hitting, riding the high of their first Super Regional appearance in school history and the left arm of ace pitcher Derek Clark, were on the verge of closing out a crucial victory.

And then, in something of a blur, the Tar Heels hit two home runs, scored three runs and walked off the field in a celebratory mob after Vance Honeycutt’s two-run home run gave UNC an 8-6 victory. With a win Saturday, or in a decisive third game on Sunday, the Tar Heels would return to the College World Series.

“This place is special,” said Honeycutt, whose home run was his team-leading 25th of the season, and his 62nd as a UNC player. Earlier this season Honeycutt became UNC’s all-time leader in home runs, and what he did in the ninth inning on Friday night, with two outs, lends credence to the thought that some kind of higher baseball power is fueling the Tar Heels.

“We’re having some Bosh magic,” Honeycutt said, and who could argue after yet another late-game comeback? UNC won in similarly-dramatic fashion in its regional last week against Long Island, and again in two close victories against LSU, which arrived in Chapel Hill as the defending national champion and left on the other side of that magic; a victim of it.

Friday night, the Tar Heels’ rally began from the get-go in the ninth. It began when Luke Stevenson, a freshman who is UNC’s No. 6 hitter, sent Clark’s first pitch of the inning deep into the deepest part of the park — back toward the wall at the limit of center field.

“How about this guy?” Scott Forbes, in his fourth season as UNC’s head coach, said of Stevenson after the game. As he spoke, Forbes patted Stevenson on the back and beamed. “Stepping up there as a true freshman, going dead center. It’s hard to hit a ball out in dead center at Boshamer Stadium.”

Indeed it is. Stevenson’s hit kept sailing and West Virginia center fielder Skylar King kept going back, chasing, hoping, and there was a brief moment when he jumped at the fence and looked like he might’ve caught it. Stevenson, in fact, thought King had caught it, when he saw him jump and when his glove bent back a little ways.

But then, Stevenson said, “I saw the umpire wave his finger in the air, and I was pretty excited.”

Suddenly it was a tie game, and bedlam at the Bosh, which was witness to so many dramatic moments last weekend, with UNC winning games that looked lost, and doing it again and again.

And doing it here on Friday night, too, with even more theatrics and another one of those moments that will endure. Stevenson’s home run was one of those, and it spoiled Clark’s pursuit of a complete game.

But then moments later, after a pitching change, came another moment that immediately entered the canon of UNC baseball, and this stadium. With a runner on first and two outs, Honeycutt, the Tar Heels’ junior center fielder and record-setting best player, blasted a drive to deep left field.

He knew as soon as it left his bat. Everyone else did, too. Honeycutt raised his arm and the sold-out crowd here stood, and the people beyond the right field fence, watching from the top row of UNC’s field hockey stadium, joined in the reveling from a distance.

Those folks back there had a good seat to watch two home runs off the bat of West Virginia’s Kyle West, and the second of those, a mammoth two-run shot in the sixth inning, sailed not only over the field fence but those field hockey stands well beyond the fence. West’s second home run gave the Mountaineers a 6-4 lead, and Clark, who is a coveted Major League prospect, did enough to keep the Tar Heels off balance at the plate.

That was, at least, until very late, and until the start of another improbable rally — the kind of which can no longer be considered all that improbable, not with how UNC keeps winning and overcoming and turning deficits into victories. The Tar Heels, Forbes said, “know they can’t be looking in the rear view mirror.” They have thrived most when the pressure has been at its greatest, the margin of error at its narrowest.

And now they’re one victory away from Omaha.