Bill Oram: So much has ended at Oregon State, but Beavers baseball just keeps on going

CORVALLIS — You can find meaning in anything, sure, but it felt symbolic on Monday when the center field scoreboard went dark entering the bottom of the ninth inning at Goss Stadium.

They literally turned out the lights on another year of Oregon State athletics in Corvallis.

Not on Beavers baseball, of course. Behind an offensive explosion that spanned nearly 20 hours, OSU dispatched with UC Irvine 11-6 to advance to the super regional round of the NCAA Tournament for the ninth time since 2005.

They are two wins away from the school’s eighth College World Series appearance and first since 2018.

“We all believe that we can go win it,” shortstop Elijah Hainline said, “and so this is just one of the steppingstones that gets us to the next (point) that we need to be.”

But with so much in flux at Oregon State, it also felt like more than that. The Beavers will now take their show on the road to Lexington, Kentucky, this weekend, and perhaps Omaha beyond that.

Monday marked the final home event on the Oregon State sports calendar.

For the last time this year, Oregon State fans gathered on campus to sing “O-S-U” in the harmony of shared jubilation, as they did when Bridger Holmes stared down UCI’s Caden Kendle with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

And to celebrate, as they did when Kendle popped up to shallow left field and Holmes gestured for fans to get loud while the ball was still in the air and before it settled into Elijah Hainline’s glove at shortstop.

Then the concessionaires closed up. The ushers went home. Everybody is off-duty at Oregon State until the fall, when a new year will begin with the Beavers’ various teams playing through alliances and with various conferences.

A new world.

Certainly, no one knows what the future looks like for Oregon State baseball after this year. The rest of the university has been pulverized by the effects of realignment. Every other major program on campus, from football to both basketball teams to softball has seen mass defections. Players who came to play in the Pac-12 now find themselves investing in something altogether different.

The nature of sports at Oregon State and in Corvallis, the identities of the people who cheer for those teams, has fundamentally shifted.

Baseball? It feels like the most insulated program at Oregon State, with the longest track record of success, the most hardware and the best culture.

Players have offered encouraging statements about returning, and coach Mitch Canham has said he feels like his program is built to withstand the forces that have caused so much harm across campus.

But uncertainty rules the day at Oregon State and the last 10 months have created many skeptics. You’d be forgiven for not trusting much of anything anymore.

So maybe then there is some poetry in the fact that the final on-campus event of the year was stretched over two days. The driving rain of Sunday night, which suspended the game in the bottom of the fourth inning, ensured that the last good thing OSU athletics has going for it lasted just a little bit longer.

No doubt the fans who braved the rain on Sunday would have liked to have seen it wrapped up then and there. The Beavers probably would have, too. But by the time the game was called under the deluge, all that was missing was Yakety-Sax playing over the speakers. Dallas Macias went sliding past second base as though on a Slip n’ Slide. The game’s next pitch nearly went over the protective netting.

Pushing the rest of the game over to Monday was the responsible and necessary choice. And the Beavers were ready. They tacked on five runs Monday to the six they scored Sunday, including homers by Macias and Mason Guerra to go along with Hainline’s blast a night earlier.

And then in the eighth inning, Travis Bazzana rocketed the first pitch of his final at-bat at Goss Stadium toward the right field fence. In a reimagined history, a gust of wind grabs hold of that ball and pushes it just inside the foul pole. Instead, it hooked just foul, and the most decorated player in Oregon State history — high bar that that is — grounded out to second base.

But it didn’t need to be a Disney movie to be a meaningful day.

Whatever Oregon State baseball looks like the next time it plays at Goss Stadium, it’s guaranteed to be different than it has.

Canham allowed himself to wax poetic about his program on Monday.

“I love pulling into the stadium in the morning and seeing the trailers out here,” he said, “and people tailgating and getting ready to watch some Beaver baseball. You get to honk your horn at them as they’re coming in.”

To young fans, he said, his players are superheroes.

“Giving autographs,” Canham said, “that’s one of the coolest moments is getting to put your name on a baseball or a card for somebody and for these guys to experience.”

In a year where the losses have eclipsed significant milestones, Canham’s team left Beavers fans with one final triumph.

The scoreboard flickered back to life with one out left in the ninth inning, just before that final popup sent the Beavers running onto the field in celebration and on to Lexington.

The Beavers are keeping the lights burning for a while longer.