The long hard road.
 
Ultimately not long enough, and a little too hard.
 
Entering Day 2 of the National Club Baseball Association (NCBA) Southern Pacific (SoPac) Division I Regional Championships knowing they needed four straight wins in the span of 27 hours, the Grand Canyon University Club Baseball team lost their second elimination-round game Saturday, 10-3, to 4^th-seeded UCLA. The loss officially knocked GCU out of the four-team, double-elimination tournament, and sent the 2^nd-seeded Lopes home from Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California without the regional championship trophy for the first time in three trips.
 
"We definitely didn't finish what we thought we were going to start this weekend," said Lopes' Head Coach Rich Warnol. "UCLA just had our number, and we just didn't help ourselves enough."
 
Elimination Round #1:  #2 GCU 12, #3 UC Davis 6
 
After allowing five unearned runs – thanks to five Lopes' errors – in the opening-round 11-9 loss Friday to UCLA, déjà vu hit the Lopes early against the University of California-Davis, falling behind, 2-0, courtesy of two walks, a wild pitch and two more Lopes' fielding miscues. This time around, though, GCU didn't wait four innings to shore up their defense and get their offense in gear. A pair of 2^nd-inning doubles by Jeremy Aguirre and Santiago Zuniga helped give the Lopes the lead for good, 3-2, then the Lopes exploded for four runs in the 4^th inning (cashed in by a Jacob Martinez single and Connor Lawrence double) and never looked back, expanding the lead to nine before UCD rallied late.
 
The Lopes' first three hitters in the lineup – Martinez, Lawrence and Johnny Harman – combined for three hits, four runs scored and eight RBI – in making the Aggies the first team eliminated from the tourney.
 
Elimination Round #2:  #4 UCLA 10, #2 GCU 3
 
The first four games of the tournament saw an average of 23 runs scored in each game, so it was apparently time for a pitcher's duel – at least for the first six innings.
 
Once Lopes' starting pitcher Andrew McCann calmed the first-inning jitters that gave the Bruins a 1-0 lead, the California native two-hit UCLA over the next four shutout innings. Unfortunately, UCLA starter Marshall Dean was just as stingy, shutting out the Lopes until GCU finally tied it up in the 5^th inning on a Harman leadoff walk, a Bruins' error that got Harman to 3^rd base, and an Easton Babe grounder that allowed Harman to score.
 
That was as close as the Lopes got to the lead, since the Bruins took the lead back in the 6^th on a two-out, RBI single from Jake Gordon; then exploded in the 7^th, sending 11 hitters to the plate and scoring seven runs on seven hits to build an insurmountable 9-1 lead. Lawrence and Josh Simpson responded by knocking in two runs for the Lopes in the bottom of the inning, but that didn't stop Dean from going the nine-inning distance to get the win, throwing a whopping 151 pitches to send the Bruins to Sunday's championship round.
 
McCann struck out six but took the loss after being chased in the 7^th-inning onslaught. Aguirre led the Lopes' offense in his final game as a Lope with three hits in four at-bats, including a double and a run scored.
 
While falling short of their third straight berth in the NCBA D1 World Series was not part of the Lopes' travel plans, reaching the regional tournament again despite the COVID-19 pandemic that virtually shut the program down for the 2020 and 2021 seasons gave Warnol reasons to smile through the disappointment.
 
"We've been fortunate that with everything that happened the last two years, we've had a ton of guys around Grand Canyon University that want to keep playing this game and found a home in club baseball," said Warnol. "Hopefully, we can keep showing up here every year and give ourselves an opportunity to make our season go as long as it can."
 
The Lopes finish the 2022 season with a 21-10 overall mark.