College World Series Finals 2015: UVA vs. Vanderbilt Game 3 Score and Recap

The Virginia Cavaliers completed their improbable 2015 College World Series run in fitting fashion, coming back from an early deficit to outlast the Vanderbilt Commodores, 4-2 in Wednesday's Game 3 to win their first national championship.

NCAA Baseball summed it up in the only way possible:

Pitching wasn't supposed to take center stage yet again with both teams' aces already used up, but Brandon Waddell insisted. Virginia's starter allowed two first-inning runs before settling in for seven innings of work, allowing just four hits and giving his offense the chance to come back from the early deficit.

After that opening-inning explosion, the Commodores' bats went cold, mustering up just three hits in the final eight innings. Virginia eventually got to Vanderbilt pitcher Walker Buehler on Pavin Smith's two-run homer in the fourth that evened things up, and Smith later delivered what proved to be the title-winning RBI on his fifth-inning single.

It's been a truly remarkable run for Virginia, who struggled in ACC play only to deliver the conference's first national title in more than six decades. The Cavaliers hardly even made their conference tournament, as David Teel of Daily Press noted:

ESPN Stats & Info put their unlikely national title in further perspective:

Although the night ended in celebration of that long drought ending, it began with reason to believe that would be replaced with the celebration of a Vanderbilt repeat.

The 'Dores bats woke up following a Game 2 loss in which they went scoreless. Doubles from Rhett Wiseman and Zander Wiel helped Vanderbilt push its lead to 2-0 early, and the 'Dores looked to be settled in from the plate.

With Buehler dealing on the mound, Vandy entered the fourth inning in control of its own destiny before one key plate appearance from Kenny Towns shifted the game. He only walked, but fought off a 1-2 count to get on base for Smith.

The rest, well, is history, as NCAA Baseball showed:

With another chance at the plate in the very next inning, the freshman wasn't done. Smith delivered a two-out single past the third baseman, bringing around Adam Haseley to score and put Virginia up for good.

Smith hasn't had the greatest CWS in terms of overall numbers, but he more than changed that with his performance Wednesday, as Aaron Fitt of D1Baseball.com noted:

From there on, it was up to Waddell to do what Buehler and Vanderbilt's bullpen arms couldn't do—shut the door. And unlike Buehler, he only seemed to grow progressively stronger as the night went along.

Waddell got going in the middle innings, absolutely dominating the Vanderbilt bats and retiring the entire lineup (0-for-9) in its third go-round at the plate. It marked a span of 11 batters that he retired, which made it hard to remove him from the game, as Shotgun Spratling noted:

Waddell eventually had to hand the ball off in the bottom of the eighth, but not before the Cavaliers had given another insurance run to push the lead to 4-2 off of Towns' RBI single to score Haseley. And he handed it off to the best arm available in Nathan Kirby.

The 'Dores twice got the tying run at the plate against Kirby, but No. 1 overall pick Dansby Swanson gave up their best chance in the eighth on his check-swing strikeout. Moments later, the curtain closed on Vanderbilt's quest for a repeat.

After a hard-fought series that went the distance, the two head coaches couldn't help but share mutual admiration, as the Tennessean's Adam Sparks noted:

The win proved gratifying for Virginia on a number of obvious levels, but it was even more special for those Cavaliers players who returned from last season. They fell short to this same Vanderbilt team in a similar three-game series, and for stretches of Wednesday's game, it looked like their fate would be the same this year.

But it wouldn't have been fitting to see their Cinderella-esque run in 2014-15 to Omaha end in anything other than a dog pile at the center of the TD Ameritrade Park field.