Diving full-bore into football and basketball season is certainly fun, but one of college sports’ simplest pleasures is diving headlong onto the bandwagon of a team you don’t generally follow.

We Notre Dame fans certainly did that over the weekend as the Irish stunned Tennessee, unanimous #1 team and newly minted villains of college baseball, in the super regionals to advance to the College World Series. ND plays Texas Friday night in the first game of the double-elimination format.

The Irish returned to Indiana early Monday evening after their victory to a throng of supporters, most notable among them football coach Marcus Freeman, who continues to show off an embrace of the Irish that has his approval rating hovering somewhere around 73 million percent with fans (and rising).

Expectations weren’t high going into the weekend. Yes, ND had been ranked #1 at one point in 2022 and had, to most observers, been robbed of hosting a regional. The Irish instead had to go down to Georgia Southern and dispatched Texas Tech, the host Eagles, then Texas Tech again to earn their ticket to Knoxville. There, all ND had to do was defeat a team being touted as not only the #1 team but one of the best collegiate teams of the century, a team that owned the best offense and the best pitching staff in America.

Oh, and they weren’t just facing a team, but seemingly an entire city. Knoxville embraced the Volunteers and the things others hated about them. The allegations of cheating via bat-rolling (there’s something I’d never heard of) fueled fan doubt in the Volunteers’ high-flying home run totals, and the players’ wild celebrations and bat flips created a strong us-against-the-world mentality. So strong, in fact, that the Vols students themselves embraced it by producing a run of t-shirts for the occasion that read “Classless vs. Catholics,” a callback to ND’s famous “Catholics vs. Convicts” shirts of nearly 35 years prior.

Whatever your thoughts about Tennessee’s team – it seems their antics rubbed even their own SEC brethren the wrong way – what can’t be denied is that Sunday’s winner-take-all game was tense as hell. (ND raced out to a big lead early in Game 1 to pick up the win before the Vols roared back with a dominant performance in Game 2 to set up the final showdown.)

With the ND offense seemingly foundering and fans glumly reaching for their white flags, the spunky Irish hit back-to-back home runs in the seventh inning off UT star pitcher Chase Burns – first catcher David LaManna, who’d hit only one other dinger all year, then Jack Brannigan, who’s tied for the team RBI lead – to grab a 4-3 lead and stun the orange-clad crowd into deafening silence.

They proceeded to add three insurance runs to suck much of the drama from the final inning before the dog-pile celebration, also viewable in the above video.

The Irish did pull something like this off once before, as the olds among us (myself included) may recall. They beat then-#1 Florida State 20 years ago in the super regionals under the same circumstances before bowing out in the CWS. Here’s hoping the run lasts even longer this time.

(It’s probably quite important that it does. I hate to pour any cold water on this, but Florida State did fire their coach last week, and current Irish coach Link Jarrett played for the Noles and still lives in Tallahassee. Not hard to connect the dots there.)

The Horns are ‘only’ the #9 seed in the tournament, but anyone who knows anything about college baseball knows their championship pedigree. No school has made more CWS appearances than Texas, this year making its 38th, although they haven’t won the big prize since 2005. (By comparison, ND is making trip #3 to the big event.) The Longhorns boast, among others, slugger Ivan Melendez, who broke the college single-season home run record in Texas’ super regional finals win over East Carolina – a record previously held by a guy named Kris Bryant. Their pitching staff, headed by Pete Hansen and Lucas Gordon, is formidable. (They actually have a guy named Ace on their team, and I’m as disappointed as you are to see that he is not actually a pitcher.)

All of this is scary, but hey – ND has already slain one giant this summer. Why not add a few more?