When Dylan Crews slid into third base for the final triple of his illustrious college career, he turned to the LSU bench and followed in the footsteps of Angel Reese by pointing to his ring finger. It was originally Joe Burrow who offered up that subtle celebration in the closing moments of LSU’s football national title to close 2019. In other words, yes, Tiger fans are plenty used to seeing their stars do that.

It’s code for “put a ring on this finger because we did it again.”

That is, win a national title.

By the time Crews collected himself and made the closing gesture to the dugout, the Tigers were well on their way to a blowout 18-4 victory against Florida to clinch their first College World Series title since 2009. Never mind the fact that it was the Gators who owned Sunday with a historic beatdown of the Tigers.

Monday was a different story. A very different, but simple story, really.

It was the perfect sendoff to close out The Year of the Tiger.

LSU became the first Division I school to ever win a basketball and baseball title in the same school year. That’s right. Men’s or women’s hoops. Add in the fact that Brian Kelly led the Tigers to a victory over Alabama AND he took home SEC West title, and yeah, it’s safe to say they don’t make ’em all like the 2022-23 LSU school year.

They certainly don’t make them all like Monday’s title game rout of Florida, either.

Every LSU starter got a hit, drove in a run and scored a run. For a team who desperately struggled with leaving runners on base in the first 2 games of the series, LSU was as opportunistic as it got. It chased Florida’s flame-throwing starter Jac Caglianone in the 2nd inning and it put up a 6-run inning without an extra base hit (those came later).

Oh, and remember when we spent all that time wondering about how Jay Johnson would use ace Paul Skenes and if he’d get the ball on 3 days rest? Yeah … about that. He never saw the mound. Well, not until he carried injured LSU catcher Alex Milazzo on his back for the postgame dogpile.

The stat sheet will show that starter Thatcher Hurd merely delivered a quality start with 6 innings of work and 2 earned runs allowed. Given Ty Floyd’s 17-strikeout showing on Saturday and Skenes’ gem the game before that against Wake Forest, Hurd’s performance might be lost in the shuffle of this LSU run.

But what Hurd did, especially knowing that everyone in Charles Schwab Stadium was expecting to see Skenes if things got tense, was as clutch as it gets. It didn’t rattle Hurd that Florida All-American Wyatt Langford stayed hot with a 2-run blast to kick off the scoring in the first inning. After that, Hurd dialed in. He led up just 3 baserunners the rest of the way while LSU pounced on the Florida pitching.

Johnson never panicked. He never got antsy with his generational pitcher. Instead, he trusted his non-stars to step up … and boy did they. Florida tied the record for hits in a College World Series game on Sunday, and LSU broke it on Monday.

We can talk all we want about LSU’s talent and how special this team was, but without the right person pulling the strings, this season could’ve ended well before Monday night’s coronation.

Johnson came to LSU to make those decisions, and to do so on that stage. You don’t leave a job like Arizona to do anything but win national titles. The master plan was executed.

“Right people, right place, right time,” Johnson said afterwards on the ESPN broadcast. “This was the way it was supposed to go.”

There’s no guarantee that it’ll line up like this again for a long time. It’s not that easy to pluck guys like Skenes and Tommy White out of the transfer portal. It’s not supposed to be easy to pluck a guy like Johnson, either. Credit Scott Woodward for that. The LSU athletic director should be walking on air after the way this year turned out.

His splashy football hire, Kelly, took down Nick Saban in Year 1. His splashy (and flashy) women’s basketball hire, Kim Mulkey, took down Caitlin Clark and won a national title in Year 2. And now, his splashy, but not-as-flashy baseball hire just ended the program’s title drought and took home the CWS crown in Year 2.

To have that kind of early success in 3 of 4 major revenue sports is darn near impossible … as is consuming 70,000 Jello shots at the same establishment over a 1.5-week stretch. That’s LSU for ya.

This is the golden age. It’ll be a time in which we look back at LSU and think about all the athletic star power it had on its campus at the same time, much like Florida experienced in the latter half of the 2000s. You could argue that Florida’s athletic stretch from 2005-09 — which included a football and men’s basketball title in the same school year — was the best 4-year run of any school in the 21st century.

Dare I say, LSU is poised to threaten that.

There’ll be more time for that discussion. On Monday night, all LSU could take from Florida was a chance for immortality on the diamond. It did that. Over and over again, it did that.

We questioned if this LSU team could get off the mat one more time after how quickly Sunday’s potential series-closing game fell apart. A team who lost the No. 1 ranking that it held for much of the season had to find itself down the stretch. It couldn’t just rely on the gobs of star power that dominated preseason conversation and highlighted mock drafts. It had to survive 3 consecutive elimination games and take down the No. 1 team in the country on consecutive nights. It had to stop leaving runners on base and start cashing in on prime opportunities. Without that, LSU’s prime opportunity would slip away.

By night’s end, though, LSU left no doubt.

The Year of the Tiger was one for the ages.