One nightmare of an eighth inning sent Wake Forest’s baseball team home from the NCAA tournament.

Maryland scored six runs to take command in a 10-5 win over the Deacons in an elimination game on Sunday at Bob “Turtle” Smith Stadium.

“Between this game and the UConn game (on Friday), they’re both going to hurt for a while because we had them both where we wanted it,” coach Tom Walter said. “Game of bullpens, we like our chances in those games and we came out on the wrong side of both of those games this weekend.”

Maryland advances to a Sunday night matchup against Connecticut, which beat Wake Forest 8-7 in the opening game of the regional and beat Maryland 10-5 on Saturday night. Maryland will have to beat UConn twice – the potential seventh game of the regional would be Monday night at 7 p.m.

It looked like that would be the Deacons (41-19-1) getting a rematch with UConn, but with two outs in the top of the eighth – Wake Forest was the home team despite playing at Maryland – that changed in a hurry.

Seth Keener, who entered after Teddy McGraw pitched six strong innings and only allowed two runs, recorded the first two outs of the eighth on groundouts before surrendering a five-pitch walk.

That was the beginning of the end – Bobby Zmarzlak hit a two-run homer to tie the game at 5-5, Gabe Golob relieved Keener and gave up a four-pitch walk, a double that scored Kevin Keister, and a two-run homer to Chris Alleyne.

Maryland wasn’t done there; closer Camden Minacci entered and surrendered two walks and an RBI double by Troy Schreffler Jr. for the Terrapins’ sixth run of the inning. Ian Petrutz’s solo homer off of Minacci in the ninth was salt in the Deacons’ season-ending loss.

“We’ve got to shore up our bullpen,” Walter said when addressing the prospects of next season’s team. “The second half of the year, our bullpen struggled, really from the Clemson series (April 15-17) on, our bullpen was on roller skates.”

Maryland native Pierce Bennett, a couple of days after taking a ball off his head in centerfield, had quite the day, going 3-for-5 with a solo homer to give Wake Forest a 3-2 lead in the fifth.

Brock Wilken’s two-run homer in the sixth put the Deacons ahead 5-2 – and the length of that bottom of the sixth, which also saw Maryland change pitchers, had something to do with McGraw being pulled from the game, having thrown 99 pitches.

“His pitch count ran up there a little high, we were kind of in between whether to send him back out there in the seventh,” Walter said. “But especially once we spread it to 5-2 at that point, figure we’d go to a fresh arm, it was a little bit of a long inning.”

Keener gave up a solo homer in the seventh that marked the start of Maryland scoring the game’s last eight runs.

The bullpen collapse puts a stinging feeling into the end of what was a turnaround season for Wake’s program, going from 20 wins last season and missing the ACC tournament to being a No. 2 seed in a regional and dropping a couple of late-inning losses in the NCAA tournament.

“We definitely made a great stride forward this year,” outfielder Adam Cecere said. “Obviously we doubled our win total from 20 to 41. Our goal at the beginning of the season was to play deep into the postseason, we put ourselves in a really good position to do that.

“We came up short in the two close games, obviously games are won in the postseason with clutch hits and clutch pitches, things like that, and we fell on the short side of both of those.”

For the third straight game, Wake Forest scored in the first inning – getting RBI doubles by Bennett and Brendan Tinsman.

And for the third straight game, Wake Forest’s bats went quiet for the next few innings. In three games of the regional, Wake Forest scored a combined seven runs in first innings – and only scored once in second, third and fourth innings.

Maryland tied the game at 2-2 with Maxwell Costes’ two-run homer in the second, which came after a throwing error by Wilken at third base. Wilken later made amends by throwing out a runner at home in the fourth.