A few truths come with every SEC baseball tournament.

Without fail, it will rain Tuesday.

The outfield grassy hills at the Hoover Met will always be filled by kids playing catch. A few will learn about gravity.

And if Alabama and/or Auburn are involved, this corner of suburban Birmingham will snarl with traffic. Scars of the 2011 debacle are just as fresh as those skinned knees in the outfield.

Hoover delivered on each with the reliability of a strip mall chain restaurant. It rained Tuesday. Gravity happened and seeding created an Alabama-Auburn doubleheader once the clouds broke.

The Crimson Tide and Tigers entered this rite of May two of the hotter teams in the league. Auburn had won eight straight coming to Hoover.

Alabama … well, its 9-2 month of May come with a few footnotes. That’s perhaps what made the electric atmosphere at the Met a little different — adding a dash of spice to the uniformity of this event.

A 4-0 win over Kentucky had a little extra emotion in one of the more improbable runs given the circumstance. Less than three weeks after its head coach Brad Bohannon was fired for his alleged part in a national-headline grabbing gambling scandal, this Crimson Tide team is playing its way into a rare position.

Those nine wins in 11 games have the Tide (39-17) in the conversation to host an NCAA regional for the first time since 2006. It has a veteran roster, an us-against-the-world mentality and Andrew Pinckney.

The right fielder belted his 16th homer Tuesday in one of the deeper ballparks this side of the original Yankee Stadium and has a hose for a right arm. His outfield assist that ended the second inning when Devin Burkes tried tagging up on a fly ball set the tone for an Alabama crowd eager to break out of the program’s multi-generational slump.

The Bohannon firing felt another stab from the butter knife that slowly bled the program from Omaha-regular to mediocrity. This newsman joined the doomsday chorus May 4 when Bohannon was canned just hours before opening a three-game series then-No. 5 Vanderbilt.

A peak-and-valley 2023 season was sure to circle the bowl, right?

Only nobody told the Alabama clubhouse.

And it hasn’t really been a slow burn since, opening with a near-run-rule win over the powerhouse Commodores the night of the firing.

The Tide’s outscored opponents 74-26 since with series wins over Vanderbilt and Texas A&M before sweeping defending national-champion Ole Miss to close the regular season.

“Sometimes,” interim coach Jason Jackson said, “this stuff kinda helps you focus a little bit.”

This group found another gear in the last six games.

They’ve outscored foes 48-5 in that span as nobody’s come within three runs of the Tide.

It was enough to push Alabama to the top of the SEC in terms of team ERA, closing the regular season at 4.62 in league play before shutting out the Wildcats on Tuesday.

And the 5-1 regular-season finale win over Ole Miss was enough to give Alabama a plus-48 run differential in league play — again topping co-champion Arkansas. The heater was enough to push Alabama’s SEC record to 16-14 for its first league winning record in nine years.

The shutout of Kentucky — No. 2 in the RPI — was a reversal from dropping two of three to the Wildcats in the pre-gambling scandal era. Wildcat coach Nick Mingione remembers a conversation with Bohannon earlier this season in which the now-fired coach called this team the best he’s ever had.

Asked about this team’s mentality given the circumstances, Pinckney took Crash Davis’ interview advice.

“We’re not really worried about adversity,” the co-SEC scholar-athlete of the year said in the postgame. “We’re just playing no pressure — playing for the guy beside us and just taking everything a pitch at a time. When you do that and you play for the team, good things happen.”

Jackson, the interim coach, said he hopes a 17th win over SEC competition pushes Alabama over the threshold to become one of the 16 regional hosts. The Tide is No. 12 in the RPI with six SEC schools ranked higher and Auburn three spots back at 15th.

It’ll face RPI No. 5 Florida, the top-seed in Hoover, at 4:30 p.m. CT Wednesday with a shot to further bolster the résumé that certainly didn’t look as strong 19 days ago.

The Gators (42-13) will be the strongest team Alabama’s faced in this surreal span and that’s where another Hoover truth comes into play. Each of the last three SEC tournament champions had the same top seed Florida carries into Wednesday.

So we’ll see if this Alabama team can continue to defy gravity in a month of May unlike any before.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.