Years of baseball hardship came to an end Tuesday afternoon for both the Yeshiva University Maccabees and the Lehman College Lightning.
Lehman broke a 42-game losing streak with a 7-6 extra-inning victory over Yeshiva, a Modern Orthodox Jewish school, in the opener of a nonconference doubleheader in Teaneck, New Jersey.
The eight-inning heartbreaker was Yeshiva’s 100th consecutive loss.
"A sense of relief, a sense of joy," winning Lightning pitcher Justin Chamorro told "NBC Nightly News" on Wednesday, summing up the team's emotions after finally winning.
"When there’s a lot of adversity going your way it's that much sweeter on other side."
After Lehman's streak-breaking triumph, the Maccabees stormed back in the nightcap to win, 9-5, ending the longest active losing skid in college baseball.
The Maccabees, now 1-19 this season, had last won a game on Feb. 27, 2022, in a doubleheader sweep of the John Jay Bloodhounds.
Before Tuesday, the 1-14 Lightning last visited the winner’s circle on May 9, 2023, with a 7-4 victory over the Baruch College Bearcats.
Tuesday's triumph felt like winning a championship, Yeshiva coach Jeremy Renna said.
"Different folks in sports, cresting a mountain can be winning a championship," he said Wednesday. "For us, winning a game was that for us."
Even as losses piled up, Lehman coach Chris Delgado said he reminded players that baseball is a never-ending pipeline of opportunities and that there's always another game to be played.
"Success doesn't last forever, neither does failure," said Delgado, 26, who was a player on that last Lightning team to win before Tuesday. "Every day you get a new opportunity to show up."
Yeshiva came agonizingly close to a sweep on Tuesday, holding a 6-4 lead in Game 1 with only three defensive outs needed for victory.
Brandon Deynes' two-run double tied it in the seventh for Lehman, before Elias Fermin was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded in the eighth to push across the go-ahead run.
In the nightcap, Jake Arnow and Noah Steinmetz each drove in two runs for Yeshiva. Steinmetz, the first baseman, came in to pitch and nailed down the game's final two outs as the Maccabees celebrated victory for the first time in 1,136 days.
Tuesday’s doubleheader on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, one of several home fields rented out by Yeshiva, had received national attention and mockery.
Yeshiva alumnus and comic Eitan Levine had called the matchup “statistically, the worst baseball game of all time.”
Yeshiva's 100 straight losses still fell well short of the 228 consecutive games the Caltech Beavers lost from 2003 to 2013, though.
The NCAA does not have any record of most combined losses by two teams meeting in any one contest.
An NCAA spokesperson, told of the upcoming Yeshiva-Lehman contest, said Monday, "Wow, those are big numbers."
With the Lightning's massive losing streak now in the rearview mirror, Lehman pitcher Chamorro admitted that staying motivated was a challenge at times.
"You got to be optimistic because when you're in a hole like that, it's hard, it's hard to find the positives," he said.
"I kept telling my teammates...just keep pushing. It's going, it's going to happen."
