Editor’s note: This is the first part of a series of stories previewing Wake Forest’s 2024 baseball season. With the Deacons coming off a trip to the College World Series and reloading for another shot at Omaha, get a sneak peak at how they stack up before the Feb. 16 opener.

WINSTON-SALEM – Everything about the ending was just so … abrupt.

Tom Walter went out to make a pitching change in the 11th inning of a scoreless game. LSU had the leadoff runner on and Wake Forest’s coach wanted to go to his closer.

You know the rest, right?

One pitch, one swing, one eruption. LSU was propelled to the national championship; Wake Forest’s dream season was over.

You could say the mourning period was abrupt, or brief, too.

“We got off the plane from Omaha and we were right in the portal,” Walter said. “The next month, solid, every day working on portal additions. … The timing of all that for us is just crazy.”

It was a crazy transition that ended a landmark season. Wake Forest won 54 games, went unbeaten across 10 ACC series and reached Omaha for the first time since 1955. A junior class that played through a miserable pandemic season in which Wake Forest didn’t make the ACC tournament led a march that brought Wake Forest three wins shy of a national title.

As painful as the ending was, the 2023 season for Wake’s baseball program was a coalescence that was years in the making.

And time will tell if it was precursor or flash in the pan.

Steps — starting with those first ones off the plane — have sure enough been taken to see that it’s the former.

“The thing I like about our guys, they’re hungry,” Walter said. “They want to get back there and they want to win the whole thing. That’s the goal and that’s what we’ve set our sights on.”

It’s baseball. It’s probably not going to be as easy as it sometimes looked last season.

But Walter likes where his team is heading into his 15th season with the Deacons.

“Whether we have the opportunity or not remains to be seen,” he said in continuation of those sights. “But again, we’ll certainly have the talent and the pieces together.”

The byproduct of having a surplus of both talent and experience is what came in July. Wake Forest had a program-record 10 players drafted, including first-rounders Rhett Lowder and Brock Wilken. Every player drafted wound up signing, including sophomores Tommy Hawke and Sean Sullivan.

Along with transfer portal attrition, Wake’s roster was pared down. Some crucial players returned, others were added through the transfer portal — it’s a two-way highway, doomsayers — and Wake Forest has a talented freshman class that’s going to be asked to play a larger role than last year’s was.

It’s a roster that doesn’t have as much top-end talent as last year’s did.

It has more.

Depending on the mock draft you find, either three, four or five Deacons are set to be first-round picks in the summer. That’s first baseman Nick Kurtz, new centerfielder Seaver King (and infielder, but more on that later), and the weekend rotation — Josh Hartle, Chase Burns and Michael Massey (that’s the Friday-Saturday-Sunday order, but also, more coming later).

Wake’s non-conference schedule is where you’ll find a lot of the same opponents as last season. The start of ACC play is going to be quite the test — the Deacons open with a Duke team that was one win away from Omaha last year, and then travel to the team that beat the Blue Devils to reach Omaha (Virginia). Four other ACC series are against teams that reached the NCAA tournament last year (Boston College, UNC, N.C. State and Clemson).

The talent assortment is, again, robust. The schedule lines up similarly. The coaching staff is the same.

Things are lined up for the Deacons to make it back to Omaha.

In the coming editions of this series, we’ll talk about how the Deacons will line up.