Agony and ecstasy

 The best and the worst, all in one. Sometimes you really do get that.

Sometimes joy comes with a side of grief, but not really grief, because the joy diffuses it. Illuminates it. Gives it a gloss of ecstasy even when it is agony that is its core truth.

That all happened Sunday. And not where you might think, I'm guessing.

It happened in Eastlake, Ohio, site of the NCAA Division III College World Series. A team from Wisconsin-Whitewater eliminated a team from Birmingham-Southern College on a walk-off home run, 11-10, after Birmingham-Southern blew a 10-5 lead.

That did not just end the team from Birmingham-Southern's season, it turns out. It ended its existence.

That's because the Birmingham-Southern baseball team was the last vestige of Birmingham-Southern as a whole, its run to the D-III World Series an odd brew of triumph, loss, magic and heartache. The small liberal arts school from Alabama, see, announced it was shuttering its doors at the end of the 2023-24 school year. Like so many small liberal arts schools across America these days, financial woes did it in.

What that meant was the Panthers baseball team was representing its school, it was its school. And when the end came with dramatic suddenness Sunday, it took awhile for everyone to absorb the fact this was not only it, but it.

Then the players, and the alumni who had come to see Birmingham-Southern one last time, lined up along the third-baseline, tipped their caps to their fans and left the field holding hands with teammates.

After that, it was left to head coach Jay Weisberg, who came to BSC in 2007, to sum it all up. He did so eloquently.

"I know a lot of people have pride in their schools, and they should," he said in a Associated Press piece. "We aren't different from many. But it's such a beautiful place, physically. We have the best sunsets in the world. The message about Birmingham-Southern is that it changed lives. It was a place where people came as young men and women and left as mature men and women.

"What this nation has seen over these last three weeks and the joy we brought is exactly what this program is ... Birmingham-Southern could have gone off into the sunset and not many people besides graduates or the Birmingham community would know about it. But now the nation knows there were some pretty special things that happened here."

Indeed.