CLEMSON -- Whatever Erik Bakich says henceforth to explain this spectacular orange vapor trail, one of his advisors should probably make sure he stays away from a certain phrase.
One of Monte Lee's most memorable lines over his Clemson tenure was this, in his second season when his team seemed to have all the mojo on its side and it seemed like everything was going up, up and away.
"They eat pressure like candy."
He said this when the team was coming up clutch left and right on the way to a 30-5 start overall and 14-2 in the ACC.
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And almost precisely after he uttered those words was when his team's teeth started rotting and falling out.
They finished the regular season 39-17 and 17-13 in the conference, and then were shown the door of their own NCAA Regional with two losses to Vanderbilt.
Sometimes what seems a sure thing at the start can turn out to be a failure. That's certainly the postscript of Lee's seven seasons, and zeroing in on the reasons he didn't succeed here remains difficult.
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One assessment does feel fairly ironclad looking back: The head coach, assistants and the program itself just lost its fizz after the pandemic cancelled what started as a promising 2020 season.
A 60-50 overall record his last two seasons, and back-to-back losing records in the ACC, were about more than talent. There was just something lacking intangibly from the leadership, and it went all the way to the top.
So this stupefying run under Bakich is about more than just what things looked like and felt like earlier this season.
It's also about what things looked like and felt like before he arrived.
The typical hardcore Clemson baseball fan has been beaten down a lot over the years.
Jack Leggett was justifiably fired after failing to get an NCAA host spot for four consecutive seasons.
So when his replacement got the Tigers back into the hosting business his first three seasons, there were times in late May when you felt like they were getting closer to their traditional standards.
Closer to Omaha.
But when those seasons end and you're watching Oklahoma State celebrate on your own field, followed by Vanderbilt doing it two years in a row after drubbing Lee's teams, you realize you're further away than you thought.
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And you come up with all sorts of reasons -- Academic Common Market, scholarship limitations, etc. -- that you might never be in position to get back to where you were.
Even this year when Bakich's team started to turn it all around and started to look like they might be made of something special, there wasn't real big-game buzz inside Doug Kingsmore Stadium.
Still plenty of empty seats. Still reason to wonder how many traditional baseball fans had been lost to the other diamond beyond the left-field fence of DKS, sold on the uplifting and fun and snappy spectacle that is Clemson softball.
With every sport that matters there is a relationship between the fans and the program, and numbers don't tell that story as much as the feeling you get when you're inside the stadium.
It took time for Dabo Swinney to win big, but he connected with his fans from the start. You could feel it and hear it.
And even after way more losing over two football seasons than anyone envisioned this time two summers ago, he remains universally adored in a way that you can feel and hear every time he steps off the bus and to the top of the hill.
We were not in the living rooms of all the Clemson fans who tuned in to the events in Durham over the weekend when weird weather kept a lot of folks on their couches.
But you can feel the galvanizing force that is now starting to permeate a group of people who might have been looking for reasons to be skeptical until this point.
For a lot of fans, this was the first and best opportunity to sit down and spend hours getting an introduction to what Bakich's team is all about.
The amazing numbers -- 16 wins in a row, 21 of 22 overall, 23 come-from-behind wins -- tell a lot of the story but not all of it.
More powerful than those trends is the feeling you get that this team is going to get it done. As Caden Grice said at some point last week: They're not hot; they're just plain good. And you could see it in the body language they displayed over those television screens.
Still some unfinished business to tend to in the broad, traditional sense. Because the last time a Clemson baseball team won an NCAA series on its home field was 13 long years ago, and since then it's been 0-for-4 in home regionals.
But after the slide under Leggett and the disorienting fog of Lee's last three seasons -- and then the time not long ago in this very season when it felt like Bakich's first team was just not good at all -- this feels like something real and lasting.
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It feels like maybe not just a relationship repaired between a fan base and a program, but maybe some repairs to the potholes on the road to Omaha as well.
So the superstitious among you might be terrified of Bakich uttering something like Lee did six years ago about eating pressure like candy, and nothing really feeling the same thereafter.
But the reality is Bakich can say whatever he wants and it's not going to matter.
Because this team and this program feel legitimately and comprehensively transformed.
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