Saint Mary’s ended No. 1 UCLA’s season on Sunday with a 6-5 walk-off win in extra innings, sending the top national seed home before a regional final. Makoa Sniffen delivered the hit in the 10th inning, and Cody Kashimoto raced around third base and slid headfirst into home to score the winning run.
The result made UCLA the second No. 1 national seed ever to miss a regional final and the fifth top seed to fail to reach the super regionals since the NCAA’s current tournament format began in 1999. For a program that had entered the day with 78 straight wins when leading after the eighth inning, it was a stunning break in the kind of game the Bruins had so often closed out this season.
UCLA had carried a 5-4 lead into the ninth before Ian Armstrong sent a high-bouncing single just over Mulivai Levu’s glove to tie it. That swing erased what had looked like another late escape for the Bruins, who had built a reputation for comeback victories and walk-offs and led Division I with 30 come-from-behind wins. Saturday’s 6-5 walk-off victory had been the most recent example of that habit before Sunday turned the season on its head.
What came next only sharpened the collapse. With runners on first and second and two outs in the 10th, Sniffen lined the walk-off single that ended the game and the Bruins’ tournament run. Saint Mary’s moved on from a regional that had already produced a major upset, while another bracket delivered drama of its own as No. 16 West Virginia survived with a five-run ninth inning against Kentucky. Elsewhere, Little Rock went 3-0 in the Hattiesburg Regional to reach its first-ever super regional, a milestone that put the No. 4 seed in historic company after a run that included a 7-4 win over No. 9 Southern Miss and an 8-6 victory over Jacksonville State.
For UCLA, the question now is not how it could have happened so much as how fast the season vanished. For Saint Mary’s, the win was not a fluke of one inning but the clearest statement of the day: the No. 1 seed was gone before the tournament had even reached its next round.
