The Owls won the first two games of the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., in 2006 before dropping the next two.
This time would be different. Though the timeline was being played out the same, junior shortstop Brian Friday said that last season they were tense. This year they're not.

They may not have been, but there was definitely something amiss in the Owls 7-4 loss that ended their season.
Even in the team's first at-bat, Friday hit a pop-up into foul territory that was caught for an out. Immediately, Friday put his head down as he walked towards the dugout.
In the bottom of the first inning, Friday made an error on a grounder he routinely makes. In the third inning, he made another error on essentially the same play, and then overthrew first baseman Joe Savery.

It's not as if this was a once-in-a-lifetime meltdown for Friday (he had three errors in a game this year against St. John's), but it did come in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Nonetheless, Friday isn't the only one to blame by any means.

Though it was admirable that Rice starter Matt Langwell had tweaked his back during the game and continued to play, the combination of him and reliever Bobby Bramhall gave up five hits, seven earned runs and four home runs in four and one-third innings.

"They're obviously a great team, I just think they pitched a little better than we did," Owls catcher and Woodlands product Danny Lehmann said. The eighth-round draft pick of the Minnesota Twins went hitless in his final college game. "But the hits we gave up were just mistake pitches. Everything they were hitting was going out of the park, and that's just the way it fell."

At the plate, the Owls offense was screeched to halt after its barrage in the first two games of the MCWS. Though Savery said it was ridiculous for a team to score 29 runs in two games anyway, when the Owls had chances to clinch a berth in the MCWS final they could manage just five runs in their two opportunities.

"You know, a lot of people are going to try to make us feel like we blew it or we succumbed to the pressure or all of those things, but that's just not true," Savery said. "Yes it's disappointing to go out like that, you want to win, but top three in the country ain't bad."

Early in the season, there was much fanfare surrounding the Owls after garnering a consensus preseason No. 1 ranking. But early losses to teams like Texas State and Long Beach State had outsiders wondering if the right call was made.
Back then, Lehmann contends that no one thought they'd even get this far.

"We made it to Omaha which no one thought we were going to do when half the people jumped off our bandwagon after we lost a couple of games," Lehmann said. "But we turned it around, we battled and did what we could do.

"It just wasn't meant to be."