Steve Sabins ushers Jorge Valdes (4) around third towards home.

MORGANTOWN — All good things must come to an end, they say, and so it is with what was the greatest season in West Virginia baseball history.

But was it an end? Or was it a beginning?

Yes, WVU’s bid to reach the College World Series ended with two humbling defeats in the heat and humidity of Louisiana in their second straight Super Regional, but can you really call it a defeat when you have set a school record for victories, when you won the Big 12 regular season championship outright, when you won a Regional championship?

Is parting really such sweet sorrow?

“I don’t get sad about baseball results,” Steve Sabins, the first-year Mountaineer coach, said in the early morning hours after his team’s season had come to an end. “I get sad about the group of people that you work with for a year straight to try to build something special — which this group did — won’t ever get to be together again. There is some sort of finality with that final out, that you’re not going to get to be with that same group of kids.

“You try to explain that from the first day of practice to really cherish the opportunity, because an opportunity is all you really ever have. These guys had the opportunity to be part of something special and they certainly capitalized on that.”

See, we all measure athletic success in the won-lost column but that really isn’t what determines the success of a team. Too much time is spent together not in competition, practicing, sharing each others’ beliefs, happiness and sorrow.

They are more than teammates.

“We were like truly brothers, like this guy here next to me,” WVU’s Super Regional hitting star Sam White said, referring to catcher Logan Sauve, who was next to him at the interview table following the final out. “We’ve been through thick and thin together. We’ve been through the ringer, especially in the bullpen when we were both catchers. Just building the relationships we’ve had over the past three years — me, Logan, Ellis Garcia, Skylar King, Grant Hussey — kind of came into fruition.

“I think everybody kind of looks forward to your junior year because that’s your draft year, but this group of guys last year was the closest group of guys I’ve ever been with … and this year’s group kind of just blew that up.”

Sabins was asked to define the identity of the 2025 Mountaineer team.

“Confident, they had fun, they trusted in each other, they were together for a long time and there was a true belief in each other. That would be my best way to summarize this team,” he answered.

This was no one-year wonder, nor was it a one-man wonder, even if Sabins exceeded any rational expectations for a first-year head coach. He understood just what had taken place in Morgantown and how the credit had to be spread out so widely.

“My view is different,” he said. “It’s not what we did over the past two years. There’s been a massive transition in the program since Coach [Randy] Mazey took over the program 13, 14, 15 years ago,” he began. “I’ve been in the program for 10 years, so what we’ve been able to do this season has been a compilation of effort over the last decade for me and over the past 15 years for Coach Mazey.

“When Coach Mazey took over the program we hadn’t been to a Regional in 18 to 19 years and when I got here hadn’t been to a Regional in 20 years. We broke through in 2017 with the first Regional in 21 seasons, so the snapshot of the last two years for me is not accurate, although they have been the two most successful years in the program’s history.

“It’s been a lot of work by a lot of great people over the course of 10 to 15 years. They’ve been playing baseball at WVU for 135 years, so not to lessen anything, but in the last 10 years there’s been exponential growth in our program, probably more than any team in the nation.”

Their legacy will not be as a Big 12 or Regional champion, at least not from the inside out.

“I want us to be remembered as a group of young men who worked every day to become the best players we could become and I think that transfers over to the performance he put on the field this year,” Sauve said. “Back-to-back Super Regionals is something that I never envisioned happening in this program, but coach Sabins and coach Mazey put together something that was really special here.”

LSU coach Jay Johnson, after watching them scratch and claw to overcome their own mistakes, recognized that something is brewing in Morgantown.

“Steve Sabins is a star,” he said in his post-game press conference. “He’s one of the best coaches in college baseball. If you are buying stock in a program, buy it in West Virginia.”

We are entering a new era in college athletics, one where the money is being distributed to the players as true professionals. They get revenue sharing and NIL money, sometimes at a disturbingly high rate, and everyone must adapt to the changes.

So, again, this is not the end of an era but, instead, the beginning of a new one.

The Mountaineers will have to rebuild a team that not only will lose players through transfers but that will see them leave now on a yearly basis to the major league baseball draft. While they never will elbow themselves into the spotlight that shines eternally on football and basketball, they have jumped from an auxiliary sport into the mainstream.

Sabins will have to carve out the Mountaineers niche in new pecking order, but he has something strong to build upon and it will be fascinating to see it grow.