After facing just two batters, Jenna Caira found herself watching the rest of Friday’s Big East semi-final from the dugout.  Caira hadn’t recorded an out, and Syracuse already trailed DePaul 1-0.

And after being called for her fourth illegal pitch in the first inning, Syracuse head coach Leigh Ross decided to make a change. SU’s pitching ace was sent to the dugout for the remainder of the game.

Enter freshman Stacy Kuwik.

With a trip to the Big East Championship on the line, Kuwik entered the biggest game of the season, and perhaps in program history, for the Orange against the No. 1 seeded Blue Demons.

‘I don’t think Ross actually said anything to me other than ‘Go get ‘em, Q,” Kuwik said in a phone interview Friday.

Short and sweet, but it was all she needed to hear.

Kuwik threw the complete game for SU, holding DePaul to one run and allowing just four hits as the Orange (31-24) pulled off the 3-2 upset at Ulmer Stadium in Louisville, Ky. By holding the Blue Demons (38-16) scoreless in six of the seven innings she pitched, Kuwik allowed her team to rally back from a two-run deficit. With the victory, Syracuse advances to the Big East Championship for the first time in school history where it will take on Louisville for the chance to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament Saturday.

Heading into the game, everything pointed towards an easy DePaul victory. The Blue Demons were riding an eight game win streak and had beaten SU nine consecutive times. Just six days ago, DePaul shut out the Orange in both games of a two-game sweep in Syracuse. Even more convincing: Syracuse had only scored three runs on DePaul in the last 41 innings played.

‘I think they came out thinking it was going to be a piece of cake, since they started the pitcher that shut us down the first time,’ SU sophomore Lisaira Daniels said in a phone interview. ‘We just came out hungry. We wanted to win.’

That pitcher was freshman Bree Brown, who threw eight innings of one-hit ball with 17 strikeouts against the Orange on May 8. This time Brown wouldn’t make it past the first batter of the third inning after she too was called for four illegal pitches.

DePaul brought in senior Becca Heteniak, and the Orange wasted no time digging itself out of a two-run hole. SU freshman Veronica Grant, just the second batter Heteniak faced, ripped an RBI double to the wall in left-center field cutting the Blue Demons’ lead in half.

‘I was not nervous about coming back at all,’ Grant said in a phone interview. ‘We didn’t let what happened to us in the past get to us at all. We just went to show them who we are.’

The SU bats came alive again in the bottom of the sixth with a pair of runs. After Daniels beat out an infield hit, Hallie Gibbs lashed a double to left-center that scored her teammate all the way from first. Two batters later, sophomore catcher Lacey Kohl singled home the winning run.

Comeback complete.

‘My team has a habit of coming and being strong right at the end when we need it, because throughout the game we are just gaining this momentum,’ Kuwik said. ‘I never thought that we were going to lose in the sense that I knew we could win if we just got some hits.’

Daniels, a transfer from Georgia, has played in and won big games before. As a freshman last season, her Bulldogs squad advanced through the NCAA Regionals and Super Regionals before winning three games in the NCAA Women’s College World Series.

But none of that, she said, can compare to the feeling of knocking off DePaul.

‘Last year going to the World Series blah, blah, blah, that was whatever, that was great,’ she said. ‘But you don’t understand what the feeling was like to fight and actually compete. That feeling was 20 times better than the World Series.’

As the adage says, it’s tough to beat a team three times in one season. The Orange proved that was true after DePaul failed to make it a clean sweep. Now SU hopes to prove it true once again against Louisville on Saturday. The Cardinals took both games of a doubleheader against SU earlier this year.

‘It feels really good, but we still have a job at hand,’ Grant said. ‘You want to be excited and you want to feel good about it, but you have to stay focused.’

Mjcohe02@syr.edu

Published on May 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13