Hearing voices.

This is hearing voices.

This is hearing voices.

Conversations with the voices that bring the excitement of college sports alive.

Now, here's your host, the voice of your fighting tigers, Chris Blair.

Welcome in Tiger fans. We got a special edition of Hearing Voices, kind of the super regional edition, if you will.

Is LSU baseball moving on after picking up the win in the regionals,

the championship game against Oregon State.

They get to take on the Kentucky Wildcats for the second time this season,

second time this year, here in Baton Rouge as the Wildcats got out of their own regional

with a big win over Indiana on Monday night.

So we're going to talk to, well, one of the voices you'll hear this weekend, the voice of Kentucky basketball. Darren Hedrick, good longtime friend of mine. Darren, first off, welcome back to Baton Rouge. I know you had a great time in mid-April, and here you go. Get to enjoy it a little bit here in mid-June. We are excited to be back, Chris, you know, and the biggest thing for me is there's a little more on the line than when we were here a couple of months ago. You know, I want to talk about Kentucky, and we'll talk about the regional this past weekend. But, you know, all this week, people have asked me, hey, did you expect to be here with LSU? I mean, preseason number one, they were number one through most of the year. They've got a roster that front offices in Major League Baseball can't wait to get their hands on. So yes, I kind of expected it. Didn't take it for granted. The team had to go out and win, but you kind of thought there was a chance to be here. What's the thought for Coach Mangeone and the Wildcatch? Do they feel the same the same way? Did they feel the same way two months ago? You know what? I thought they had a chance to get here. You know, this is a very talented team. But when you bring in so many new players, there's always questions of will this roster fill out the way we expect it to? It was a top six class in terms of the transfer portal. And so they kind of went

through and back in the fall, you could see them start to come together. There was a really quick

chemistry that developed among these guys. And I credit First Baseman Hunter Gillum because he talked

about, he said, hey, we're a bunch of older guys who have never won anything, and this is our

last chance, and we want to do that. And that has kind of been the motto of this team all year,

and as they went into the non-conference portion of the regular season, they were winning games

against quality teams like Wright State who was in a regional, Indiana State who's in a super

regional. They swept the sycamores

at Kentucky Proud Park. And then all of a sudden they got into the SEC, Chris, and they swept Mississippi

State, went on the road and beat Alabama two out of three, swept Missouri. And it's like, this

team could be special. And it was at that point, I started thinking this team can do something electric

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