The Miami Hurricanes' last losing season in baseball was in 1957.
Wrap your mind around that for a moment. It represents the greatest sustenance of success of any team, at any level, in the history of sports in South Florida, tucked away charmingly under-radar on the campus' southwest corner.
The winning in this place, like tomorrow's sunrise, is routine to a degree it begs you to take it for granted or ignore it altogether. Treat yourself to a look, though, and try not to be impressed. It's impossible.
The winning is such that it takes more than that half-century streak of winning seasons to impress coach Jim Morris.
''What's even more amazing to me,'' he said Thursday night, ``is the 36 straight regional appearances.''
NO REGULAR SEASON
UM is a machine of the college diamond, churning every year, unstoppable. Some seasons are better than others, sure. But even the bad ones are pretty good, and the good ones -- like this one -- beg an unabashed appreciation.
''We're Duke basketball,'' observed soon-to-be-retired athletic director Paul Dee, part of the packed crowd Thursday night at Mark Light Field.
It continued this night, the excellence expected, as the nationally top-ranked Canes clobbered No. 2 North Carolina 12-2 to open a three-game home series that will conclude UM's regular season.
Did I say regular season? This one has been anything but.
With its record at 43-6, including 23-3 in the Atlantic Coast Conference, this polishes up as potentially one of the best UM seasons ever -- so good that a place in the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., is entirely anticipated. At this point, anything but a fifth national championship would be a letdown, so good is this team and so high this program's standard.
''That's not what it's all about at Miami. We got a lot more to do,'' Morris said of the great regular season winding down. As for what's next? ''Potential means you haven't done it yet,'' he said.
NO HINT LAST YEAR
The strange thing is, the NCAA changed its baseball setup this year to increase parity and diminish the natural advantage of warm-weather teams such as Miami. The season was condensed, with preseason practice starting later so northern teams would not be as disadvantaged.
Those changes, on top of Miami's merely mortal 37-24 record a year ago, gave little indication entering 2008 that this season would be special. But it has been that.
Canes leadoff hitter Blake Tekotte jokes that his longish hair is such because he isn't cutting it until Miami loses a series. It invites the eventual image of Tekotte stepping into the batter's box with waist-length locks and a beard like the Biblical Moses.
This '08 team has a chance to prove itself the greatest UM has fielded in this sport, and if so it is fitting the leader of it would be one of the most quintessentially home-grown of all Hurricanes. That would be first baseman Yonder Alonso, Cuban-born and straight out of UM's own backyard, Coral Gables High.
Nobody who has watched Alonso, a possible upcoming top-10 overall draft pick, could have been surprised Thursday night when he swung at a full-count pitch with the bases loaded and deposited a grand slam beyond the left-field wall in the third inning for the game's telling blow.
The ball went way over Yonder.
The season is taking on a similar trajectory, but with no signs yet of landing.
These Canes have so much hitting, such sound defense and plenty enough pitching to make you think Morris has a great chance to add to the UM championships he collected in 1999 and 2001, to go along with two Ron Fraser directed in 1982 and '85.
FIFTH TITLE IN REACH
Fathom that the program Fraser took over in 1963 was on the verge of being disbanded, but he raised it to a state-of-the-art marvel by the time he left in 1992. (UM should name the stadium in Fraser's honor, for all-time, but I digress.)
Morris took over as guardian of Fraser's cherished child and only continued the growth.
Both men's handprints are on the run of 22 CWS appearances since the first in 1974, a frequency that has made the Canes nearly as commonplace in Omaha as the corn-fed cattle. And this summer will mark UM's record 36th consecutive NCAA regional appearance -- and likely the first it will have hosted since 2005 -- meaning the Canes have made the playoffs in their sport every season since 1973.
Dee, the longtime AD, was asked Thursday to place in context the half-century streak of winning baseball seasons with the school's other athletic prowess.
He mentioned UM football's marvelous 20-year run from 1983 through 2003, with 10 national-championship games and five championships.
''That's 10 times in the top two in 20 years,'' Dee noted.
Still, no losing baseball season since the mid-'50s? And every year in the playoffs, without exception, since '73?
Dee wouldn't budge from football but had to give baseball its due. ''I love all my children equally,'' he said with a smile.
