I was going to do a column this morning on that webinar that Cameron Henry and Jack McFarland had with the Public Affairs Research Council, in which Henry was wailing and gnashing his teeth over the Big Beautiful Bill and the Medicaid cuts which could be in it (those cuts are aimed at draining Medicaid of the illegals and other ineligible people who are nonetheless drawing from the program) and declaring that if the bill passes it’ll blow a $4 billion hole in Louisiana’s budget and necessitate a special session.

Cameron Henry just told you he’s going to try to pass the biggest tax increase in Louisiana history by far and almost nobody paid attention.

That’s a big deal, and I figured I’d mention it now, while probably getting to that column tomorrow.

Our politics sucks. There’s no getting around that. We can elect all the Republicans we want and they still turn out like Henry, Clay Schexnayder and Bill Cassidy, and all you can do is shake your head. And for lots of people it’s too much so they leave, and you can’t blame them.

But for the rest of us this place just won’t let us go.

And last night, when LSU’s baseball team was up against what might really be the best team in the country at the College World Series, and then fell behind 5-3 in the ninth inning due to some self-inflicted wounds on defense, you saw a generous sprinkle of the magic that keeps us here.

Consider what happened next.

With one out, after Arkansas pitcher Gabe Gibler had struck out pinch hitter John Pearson, Derek Curiel hit a sharp ground ball into the shift on the right side of the infield. That was second baseman Cam Kozeal’s ball, but first baseman Reese Robinett ranged over to field it only to find himself in no-man’s-land. He couldn’t get to the bag before Curiel, and Gibler, a left-hander who was coming from the third-base side of the pitcher’s mound, was late to first. Gibler was barely even with Curiel at the bag and it would have taken a good toss to make the out.

Not only wasn’t it a good toss, the ball went behind Gibler and skittered into foul territory. Curiel ended up on second base.

Then Gibler walked Ethan Frey, putting the tying run on base with one out.

Steven Milam came up next and he smashed a grounder right at Arkansas’ all-everything shortstop Wehiwa Aloy for what was surely a double play that would have ended the game and forced a rematch tonight for a berth in the final series against Coastal Carolina.

The game was over.

But it wasn’t, because inexplicably, Aloy flipped the ball to third base, getting a force-out of Curiel but leaving the tying run on base with another out left in the game.

And that out never came, not that Arkansas didn’t have opportunities.

Luis Hernandez came up next and he drilled a ball that left fielder Charles Davalan misread, and then stumbled as he tried to recover leverage on the line drive. Davalan went to the ground and the ball caromed off his shoulder into the left field corner as Frey and Milam scampered home to tie the game. Hernandez stood smiling on second base with an improbable double.

And then Jared Jones, who had just hit his 22nd home run in his previous at bat, came up with a runner in scoring position.

By then Arkansas had relieved Gibler for right-hander Aiden Jimenez, and so the Hogs’ head coach Dave Van Horn opted to pitch to Jones rather than put him on and have Jimenez face a left-handed bat in Josh Pearson.

That was a fatal mistake.

Jones crushed a low line drive over Kozeal’s head, that the second baseman managed to tip with the far edge of his glove. Hernandez motored around from second base and scored the winning run in a 6-5 victory.

Magic is the only way to explain that series of events. If Kozeal doesn’t tip that ball from Jones’ bat it isn’t at all a sure thing Hernandez is going to score from second. But he did.

If you’re an Arkansas fan, you’re going to look at that cascading disaster and conclude this was an even bigger choke than when dropping a popup in foul territory cost them the 2018 national title – the stage, a semifinal game, might not quite have been as big as the final game in 2018, but the magnitude of the rolling failure is certainly worse by a significant amount.

The Hogs have now made a dozen trips to Omaha without winning a title. Van Horn has now made 10 with no trophies to show for it. This is now a real-life Curse of the Bambino which has set in on that program, which is elite in every other respect.

At least, you’ll think of it that way if you’re an Arkansas fan. But from a Louisiana standpoint this isn’t about curses, it’s about the fact that the Saints might be snakebitten, and the Pelicans just absolutely suck, and that state capitol might be a factory of sadness, but when it comes to LSU baseball we’re blessed in a way almost nobody else is.

LSU has the best baseball program in college sports, and Tiger head coach Jay Johnson is the current master of the game.

On Saturday, he’ll get a chance to hammer that home in what might be the greatest final series college baseball has ever seen.

Coastal Carolina (possessing the nation’s best record at 56-11) might be unheralded as a program, and they’ve been referred to as a Cinderella. That’s utterly false. It’s an elite program which has been dominant in the Sun Belt Conference, which is one of the top five baseball leagues in Division 1, and the Chanticleers have already won a national championship while Arkansas has not.

That national title came in 2016, and Coastal’s route to it went through Baton Rouge, where they utterly stunned LSU in a regional – and that year’s Tiger team had the look of a national champion; the loss to Coastal Carolina is still talked about as one of the great lost opportunities in LSU history – and, interestingly enough, through Johnson. After all, it was the Arizona team that Johnson coached at the time which Coastal beat in the national championship series in 2016.

So there is a double revenge story to be told in the series which begins Saturday.

Hence some added significance to last night’s win. Because LSU was able to finish Arkansas off rather than having to play again today, both Kade Anderson nor Anthony Eyanson, LSU’s double ace pitchers who have a combined 22-3 record and rank first and third in Division 1 in strikeouts, will be rested and ready to go for Games 1 and 2 of the championship series.

That’s big, because Coastal’s pitching staff is very, very good. They might even be better than Arkansas’ pitchers. Riley Eikhoff, Cameron Flukey and Jacob Morrison are a savage weekend rotation, and because Coastal went 3-0 on their side of the bracket they’re all going to be available.

But if the Tigers can best the Chanticleers, who have won an incredible 26 straight games going into the title series, it’ll make for two national championships in the last three years and eight in the program’s history.

Get ready for a classic this weekend. And don’t discount the magic that flows from Louisiana, in this case in the direction of Omaha.