By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

(photo by Tom Morris)

I’m trying really, really hard to not be a prisoner of the moment here, but my first inclination is to say that Louisiana Tech hosting a NCAA Baseball Regional is one of the 10 most significant athletic achievements in school history.

I’m not interested in ranking the Top 10 in any kind of order and you are more than welcome to start drawing up your own list. Yes, there’s a lot of consider — great wins at different levels of college football, a men’s basketball team that was ranked in the Top 10 in the nation, Lady Techster national championships — and they are all worthy. And, to be honest, there are also a few great moments in the school’s baseball history (including twice being one win away from the College World Series).

But do you fully get what’s going on here? The stadium was literally in shambles two years ago after a tornado tore through the school’s athletic complex. That meant everything and everybody associated with the program had to do a re-set. There was a never-ending series of road games in one season, followed by a season at which they had to share with a high school team.

Raise your hand if you thought that would be a precursor to being a regional host a year later.

Winning enough to even entertain the thought of hosting a regional is always a nice idea, but that’s about all it is. Even if there had there been no tornado two years ago, Tech didn’t have the facility to host a regional, even if the Bulldogs had gone undefeated this year. So the worst thing that could happen to a baseball program became the best thing that could happen to a baseball program.

This is simply an amazing confluence of circumstances and is one of the best stories in all of college baseball this year. Not to mention what happened in the Conference USA tournament, where the Bulldogs had an incredible string of comeback victories. Without those improbable wins this week, the host bid might well have gone to somewhere other than Ruston.

The baseball team beating two Top 5 teams, winning 40 games and hosting the Conference USA tournament were all very nice. But doing it at a stadium that was torn to the ground by a natural disaster takes this whole story to another level.

While coach Lane Burroughs and the baseball team were doing all the right things on the field, the Tech administration was doing all the right things off the field when it came to the stadium. They carefully looked at every option available and correctly decided to keep the facility at the southeast corner of Tech Drive and Alabama Street. They correctly decided to give J.C. Love Field everything it needed to be on the level of other top programs.

They correctly decided to make it as nice as financially possible with an eye on one day waaaay down the road, maybe it would be able to host an NCAA Regional. While some schools are making $25 million renovations, Tech built one from scratch for that amount. Not because it wanted to.

Because it had to.

For those who have seen what J.C. Love Field looked like for 50 years, it’s still hard to believe this new facility. For those who have followed Tech baseball, which has only been to one NCAA Regional since 1987, this kind of season is also hard to believe.

Who says we can’t have nice things?