The barbarians are “at the pearly gates of college baseball,” to borrow from the lofty prose of Texas A&M coach Jim Schlossnagle. The swag surfers in Tennessee orange or Smokey gray or whatever is Friday’s garish jersey of the day are so close to shore in the only triple-landlocked state in the country.

The Vols have been to the College World Series before. This is their seventh trip overall, their third in the last four years, but never have they ridden into Omaha on such high horses under those black hats. If rah-rah Kentucky celebrated sharing the SEC regular-season championship “like it was a damn presidential inauguration,” in the unusually acerbic words of Vanderbilt Zen master Tim Corbin, can you imagine how Tony Vitello’s dudes with ‘tudes will let loose if they win it all?

A moment of silence for the Vandy Whistler at the very thought.

If you’ve been paying attention as the SEC’s been displaying its superior brand of postseason hardball as usual, it should happen. Despite the presence of three other conference brothers in A&M, Kentucky and Florida and four ACC wannabes in North Carolina, Florida State, Virginia and NC State, Tennessee should win the College World Series for the first time.

That would make UT the ninth conference member with an NCAA baseball championship in its trophy case, the league’s third newbie with a natty in the past four years after Mississippi State in 2021 and Ole Miss in 2022. Alabama and Auburn remain among a shrinking subset of SEC schools that are 0-for-Omaha.