WINSTON-SALEM – New number next to Wake Forest; same dominant Deacons.

Playing their first game as the No. 1 team across college baseball’s national polls, Wake Forest blew through UNC Greensboro 14-4 in seven innings on Tuesday night at David F. Couch Ballpark.

“There’s definitely a bigger target on our back and you see a lot more on social media about being No. 1 than No. 2,” said sophomore first baseman Nick Kurtz, who hit two early home runs on Tuesday night. “But we try to … block all of that out and just keep playing our game.”

It’s a game and a mindset that has the Deacons in rarified air.

Wake Forest (40-7) ascended to No. 1 for the first time in program history this week (there wasn’t a poll in 1955 when the Deacons won the national championship).

They’ve had plenty of time to prepare for the moment.

Wake Forest spent most of the last two months at No. 2. LSU dropping two of three games at Auburn this past weekend finally bumped the Deacons into the top spot.

“Us and LSU were at the top for however long and if they lost a series and we won a series, it was probably going to change,” Kurtz said. “We kind of had that in our heads but we weren’t really waiting for it. We weren’t expecting it to happen, we were just playing and having fun.”

Now that it has happened, Wake Forest did allow for some celebration and reflection.

Just ever so briefly.

“I sent a message to the team on Teamworks,” coach Tom Walter said, “and I said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you’ve earned this. It’s quite an accomplishment, you should be proud. But now it’s time to put the foot on the gas.

“Yeah, we celebrated for about 15 seconds.”

Wake Forest is the first team in the country to reach 40 wins. Forty wins in the first 47 games is the fastest of any of the eight Deacons teams to reach that plateau, nudging the 2002 team that started 40-9.

Forty is a nice number.

So is one.

Neither distracts this team that’s played for nearly three months with the same locked-in focus that’s turned it into a juggernaut.

“For sure,” Kurtz said of whether this is the most locked-in team he’s been a part of. “Locked in and most fun. I mean, coming in here I thought last year was going to be the most fun team I ever had, and then this year just keeps beating each other.”

Wake Forest and UNCG (21-27) met in the first full week of the season in Greensboro, which was a 20-2 win by the Deacons.

Tuesday night’s game was similarly a blowout.

Wake’s first five runs all came on homers, two sequences of back-to-back blasts. In the first inning it was Lucas Costello and Kurtz leaving the ballpark; in the third, Kurtz launched a two-run homer and Brock Wilken followed with his ACC-leading 21st homer of the season.

Kurtz has nine homers and 23 RBI in Wake’s last 11 games, a stretch that started shortly after he returned from a two-week absence because of a hamstring injury.

“You go through stretches where you see the ball well,” Kurtz said. “I feel really good up there right now and the team’s winning, so all’s good with me.”

Wilken leads the ACC with 21 homers this season; Kurtz is third with 19, and UNC's Mac Horvath is between them with 20.

The rest of Wake’s runs came in the fourth and there was one more homer, but most of the damage was done before Danny Corona’s three-run blast.

Marek Houston, Costello and Wilken all hit RBI singles, and then Justin Johnson lined a three-run double into the right-center gap.

Not everything went well for the Deacons on Tuesday night. Reliever Chase Walter exited the game after throwing four pitches in the seventh with apparent discomfort in his throwing arm (right). Tom Walter said of his son: “I don’t think it’s a ligament tear or anything like that, but it’s too early to say.”

And for Wake’s weekend series at Florida State, the Deacons are bumping Josh Hartle up to Saturday and either moving Sean Sullivan back to Sunday, or skipping his turn in the rotation.

“He had a little bit of elbow throwing the last couple of pitches the other day,” Walter said of Sullivan. “You know, still throwing the ball 91 miles an hour. So it’s nothing we’re worried about. But I could see a scenario where we skip his start and then start him Thursday against Virginia Tech.”

If Sullivan’s turn in the rotation is skipped, Seth Keener would likely start against the Seminoles on Sunday — but that depends on how or if he’s used out of the bullpen in the first two games of the series.