CHAPEL HILL – Which is worse: The agony of having a potential game-tying home run robbed, or the next batter hitting a homer against you to double the lead?

That was the swing of emotions for Wake Forest in a 7-2 loss to Miami in a semifinal of the ACC Baseball Championship on Saturday at UNC’s Boshamer Stadium.

“I thought we played maybe our best game of the year, all around,” Miami coach Gino DiMare said. “Obviously playing the No. 1 team in the country, you’ve got to play your best.”

The fourth-seeded Hurricanes (40-18) will play third-seeded Clemson in Sunday’s championship game — weather permitting, as has been the theme of the weekend. Clemson beat UNC 10-4 in the other semifinal.

Saturday’s game between Wake Forest (47-10) and Miami was moved to UNC so that there weren’t two games played on the same field. For more than half of the game, every inning was started with UNC’s grounds crew dumping dry dirt onto the field and by the ninth inning there were still puddles all over the infield.

“I think the ACC did the best they could with the information they had,” Wake Forest coach Tom Walter said. “Both teams got through it without injury or incident and it was a good, clean ballgame.”

The pivotal moment of the game came at the end of the fourth inning and start of the fifth.

At the end of the fourth, Wake Forest second baseman Justin Johnson hit a ball to the right-center gap, where a quirk in the stadium means it’s only 355 feet from home plate. Centerfielder Jacoby Long pulled Johnson’s ball back into play, landed and juggled the ball, securing the third out of the inning.

Yohandy Morales led off the fifth inning with a homer off of a light pole in right field, that coming against Wake Forest’s Josh Hartle.

That came after Morales had a two-out, two-run single in the third, and it was before Morales hit an inside-the-park homer in the ninth to provide the five-run cushion.

“Morales was the difference today,” Walter said. “Morales got the two-out single up the middle against Hartle and then got the two home runs. I mean, he really was the difference in the game.”

Miami broke the game open with a three-run seventh that turned a one-run lead into a four-run cushion. Blake Cyr’s two-run single with two outs, after an intentional walk to Morales, was the crushing blow of that inning.

The Deacons have sewn up a top-eight seed in the NCAA tournament and could still be the No. 1 overall seed when the bracket is announced Monday.

They just won’t have an ACC championship to show for this season.

“As soon as anything happens, we bounce right back,” Wake Forest third baseman Brock Wilken said. “Whether it’d be losses, whether it’d be injuries, whatever it may be someone steps up and normally we all step up at the same time, as well.”

Runners left on base would be the primary area to watch next week and moving forward. The Deacons stranded 12 runners in each of the first two games of the tournament, but scored 10 against Pittsburgh and seven against Notre Dame.

Wake Forest stranded 12 against Miami too, including four in scoring position in the first three innings.

“We’re not going to win too many games scoring two runs,” Walter said. “Normally we cash in on those situations. If we have those kind of (numbers) next weekend, I like our chances.”

Both teams started pitchers who hadn’t had game action in several weeks.

For Wake Forest, that meant Sean Sullivan’s return. The sophomore lefty hadn’t pitched since May 6 against Boston College, though you’d never know he had a three-week layoff judging by Saturday’s start.

“It was … like he didn’t skip a beat,” Wilken said of Sullivan. “Having him out there really gave us a lot of energy, especially in those conditions. We did know he was going to pitch, we didn’t know he was going to start.”

The decision to start Sullivan was Walter’s decision, he explained, a within-an-hour-of-first-pitch decision that was based on ensuring Sullivan pitched this weekend.

Sullivan mowed through Miami in the first two innings and retired the first seven batters he faced. He ended the first and second innings with swinging strikeouts of Morales, hitting .400, and Renzo Gonzalez, hitting .377, respectively.

The Hurricanes got to Sullivan in his final inning, though, getting a one-out single and two walks before he gave way to Hartle. After fouling a ball off his leg, Morales hit a two-run single up the middle with two outs to match Miami’s run total from its three-game series at Wake Forest earlier this season.

Karson Ligon had a longer layoff than Sullivan, having not pitched for the Hurricanes since April 23. Like Sullivan, Ligon got into the third inning and was pulled after allowing a couple of runners, one of which scored on Pierce Bennett’s RBI groundout.