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“I couldn’t wait to get to the plate,� Hale told me in a 2016 interview.

January 1984: After Hale turned down a Congressional appointment to attend and play football at the Naval Academy, as well as an offer to play baseball at USC, he enrolled at Arizona. UA coach Jerry Kindall elected to start Hale on opening day, against Cal State-Dominguez Hills.

In his first collegiate at-bat — first pitch — Hale hit a home run onto Sixth Street. The ball bounced to the Circle K across the street.

Asked about this newbie third baseman named Chip, Kindall said: “He’s not fast. He has an average arm. But he possesses intangibles that put him in the starting lineup. Good things come to those hard workers.�

Hale started the next 254 games. That’s every game Arizona played from 1984-87.

In Game No. 190, opening day at the 1986 College World Series against Maine, Hale, the UA’s co-captain, watched as Arizona starting pitcher Gil Heredia, a 15-game winner, struggled. Maine led 6-0 in the fifth inning. Kindall sent pitching coach Jim Wing to the mound. Instruction: Take Heredia out of the game.

Then-Wildcats hitting coach Jerry Stitt remembers the moment. A Chip Hale moment.

“When Winger got to the third base line, Chip stopped him and said, ‘don’t take him out, don’t take him out,’� Stitt recalls. “But Winger kept going to the mound, followed by Chip, who pleaded that Gil could stop Maine and keep Arizona close enough for a late comeback.

“Ultimately,� Stitt says now, “Winger turned his hands up and walked back to the dugout. He left Gil in the game.�

Kindall and Wing, two Hall of Fame coaches, so respected their junior third baseman — “Chip’s a coach on the field,� Kindall said — that they agreed to give Heredia more time.

As Hale predicted, Heredia settled down. In the bottom of the ninth, in one of the greatest moments in UA baseball history, pinch-hitter Dave Shermet hit a two-out, two-run home run to beat Maine 8-7.

A few days later the Wildcats beat No. 1 Florida State 10-2 to win the national championship. Hale went 2-for-4, scored twice and drove in a run.

Now, 39 years later, Arizona’s fourth-year head baseball coach has earned the title “Mr. Clutch,� if nothing else.

Sunday, after Arizona rallied to beat North Carolina 4-3 to advance to the College World Series, overcoming a humbling 18-2 loss in Game 1 of the Super Regionals, Hale didn’t say anything like “this is the greatest comeback I’ve ever seen.�

That’s because over the last 45 years, Hale has seen it all, from the Big Unit to a ball bouncing to the Circle K parking lot, to Shermet’s “Remember Maine� home run.

This is Hale’s third trip to Omaha with Arizona. Not all of it ended with hugs and love, but it was marked by his rise-to-the-occasion ability.

After the Wildcats squeezed into the 1985 World Series, they faced the most daunting pitching opponents a college baseball player can imagine.

In Game 1 at Omaha, the Wildcats lost 2-1 to Texas, whose All-American pitcher Greg Swindell became the No. 2 overall draft pick, a powerful lefty who went on to win 123 big-league games.

In Game 2, the Wildcats lost 9-2 to Stanford, whose pitching ace, Jack McDowell, the No. 5 overall draft pick, would win 127 big-league games.

Intimidated? Hale went 3-for-8 against those first-round heat-throwers, both future MLB All-Stars.

So when Hale coaches against Coastal Carolina Friday, his first College World Series game as a head coach, don’t expect awe and hesitation.

What hasn’t Arizona’s baseball coach seen?

In 2006, he coached the Tucson Sidewinders to a 91-53 record, the best in all of minor-league baseball that season, winning not just the Pacific Coast League but a championship playoff versus Triple-A baseball’s other regular season champions.

It was the best record in more than 70 years of minor-league baseball in Tucson.

In October 2016, two days after Hale was hired to be the manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, he agreed to meet me for an interview near the basketball offices at McKale Center.

He spoke about his incredible baseball journey. From Campolindo to Arizona to six minor league stops and to parts of seven years with the Dodgers and Twins. He had coached for the Mets, Diamondbacks and A’s, and had been the manager of Single-A, Double-A and Triple-A franchises. (In 2019, he was the bench coach for the World Champion Washington Nationals).

I asked when Hale became convinced he could make a living as a baseball coach.

“When I was playing for the Kenosha Twins, a Single-A club in 1987, my first year in the minors, my manager, Don Leppert pulled me aside one day and said ‘You should get into coaching. That’s your future.’�

Now it’s more like back-to-the-future. Hale is back in Omaha, where no other coach has a baseball resume to match that of Chip Hale.