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Few believed, though, that it would happen the following season. The Tar Heels, after all, had flamed out in two straight ACC Tournament games, and even though they had advanced to the Super Regionals, they were playing on the road, in Tuscaloosa, and they trailed Alabama 7-6 going into the bottom of the ninth.

Again, they were knocking on the door.

It took Flack to bust through.

"He was on deck to hit, and he said, 'Coach, we're not losing,' " Holbrook remembered. "We were behind, and I didn't believe him. It just didn't look good."

Until, on an 0-1 pitch, Flack belted a two-run homer over the right-field wall, sending his teammates into a frenzy and the Tar Heels to Omaha for the first time since 1989.

"Everyone in that dugout started believing at that time -- probably coaches included -- and that belief hasn't left," Holbrook said. "It's probably solely responsible for the attitude, the belief system, that's in our dugout now."

Flack did it again last June when, with UNC hosting the Super Regionals for the first time, he smashed a two-run homer in the seventh inning to beat South Carolina in Game 3. That time, the hit didn't just send UNC to Omaha, but into a new echelon.

"It's probably the biggest three-year, four-year period in Carolina baseball history," said Fox, who was the starting second baseman on UNC's 1978 CWS team. "They're going to be able to look back on it years from now and hopefully say, 'We were the initial group that came in and started turning the tide here.' That's got to be a great sense and feeling of accomplishment for them, and hopefully as they get older, it will mean even more to them as they follow the program."

Especially if they can now accomplish the one feat they haven't managed: winning an NCAA championship.

"Anything else would be a letdown since we've been there the last two years,'' said Williams, the starting center fielder. "...The upperclassmen, especially, we're not satisfied to get there.''

That may have partially been in Flack's mind last Sunday, when he approached the plate with two outs in the top of the ninth inning at Cary's USA Baseball National Training Complex.

Well before then, his senior class had shattered the school record for career victories (it now stands at 203, breaking the previous mark of 162). And with a 10-run lead, UNC's place in its third straight College World Series appeared secure, too -- thanks to the strong pitching, solid defense and powerful hitting that had been honed by four years of competition.

Then came the standing ovation from the baby-blue crowd -- not for Flack's clutch hits of the past Super Regionals, but for the winning expectations and national prominence he and his class had instilled in the program, whether he slammed another home run or not.

"He was going to strike out no matter what," Holbrook said, "because he couldn't see the ball with the tears in his eyes on that at-bat."

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