It is a shame the nickname is already spoken for by the basketball extravaganza that precedes it on the calendar, because the NCAA tournament really is softball's big dance.
Not to mention, at times, its costume party, sketch comedy and pep rally.
With the top eight seeds on hand, the Women's College World Series promises to put on quite a show on the field in Oklahoma City. But it won't be the only show -- not with what is likely to unfold between pitches. Softball's dugout culture is part of the sport's identity, as much a part of its uniqueness as the big yellow ball and underhand pitching motion.
When it comes to how the sport is perceived, it is also its vulnerability.
Rainey Gaffin is as much the reason Tennessee is here as any player on the roster. One of the most versatile players who will be in Oklahoma City, the junior is an outfielder with range; an offensive asset with patience, power and speed; and a bullpen ace with 28 relief appearances, the latter role still rarely seen among the sport's elite. But when the Lady Vols needed her from the start with the season on the line this past Sunday, she pitched all seven innings and allowed just one run in a winner-take-all game against Florida State.
Gaffin won four state championships in high school in Colorado and now begins her second trip to the World Series in three seasons at Tennessee. She meets, in other words, any definition of a competitor that makes much sense. She can do a game face, which she wore when she took the field against the Seminoles this past Sunday. It's just that she's no less likely to break out dance steps, both on the field before games big and small and sometimes even in the circle if the music playing in the stadium moves her.
Like a lot of her peers, Gaffin occasionally appears to enjoy the experience, to savor not just the camaraderie but also the competition. In sports, this constitutes unusual behavior.
"Softball, it's a game," Gaffin said. "We are fighting for a championship, but it's still supposed to be fun. So I think trying to create a fun atmosphere in the dugout, I think it helps to increase our energy, keep us in the game at the same time, but stay together and really, really focus on making sure that our energy is up on defense and on offense."
The person who sets that tempo in the Michigan dugout is senior catcher Lauren Sweet. There may be a handful of other Wolverines blessed with rhythm when the music plays, but junior reserve outfielder Olivia Richvalsky does not count herself among them.
"The rest of us kind of need her to help us out," Richvalsky said of Sweet. "So when she gets a beat going, we all kind of just feed off of that. We're dancing and we're trying to create that spark and that energy that is going to propel us through the inning."
When the Wolverines aren't dancing, viewers may this week see Richvalsky and teammates in the dugout going through a series of intricate hand gestures when Michigan players reach base. On a trip to Traverse City, Michigan, this past fall for exhibition games, third baseman and New York native Lindsay Montemarano's insistence that her roots made her the final arbiter on all things pizza somehow morphed from a nickname for her into a season-long meme.
When a Michigan hitter reaches first base, players mimic working pizza dough. Smash a double, and it's time to spread the cheese. Hit a triple, and the Wolverines toss on the pepperoni. Make it all the way home, especially via a home run, and it's time to eat.
Baseball has its unwritten rules. Softball has its invisible recipe book. One seems more fun than the other. Possibly more productive, too.
"We really want a creative, excited dugout culture," Florida State coach Lonni Alameda said of an atmosphere in her program that is similar to those in Tennessee and Michigan. "You have to define roles for your bench players. You know they want to be on the field, they want to be starters, but they're not. So you've got to create an atmosphere for them to be able to give to the team."
The roster of any team even in the running for the World Series is full of players who aren't used to watching from the dugout as games unfold without them. Richvalsky is one of many unlikely to make more than a cameo this week, more likely to appear on camera dancing than taking part in the game on the field. Yet she was an all-state softball player at South Lyon East High School in Michigan, the kind of kid good enough to be written about in the local newspaper. Also a standout student, she would have been a prize for plenty of Division I programs happy to trade scholarship money for a speedy lefty.
She knew she was signing on for less playing time as an invited walk-on at Michigan. That was the sacrifice, one she was willing to make then and still is now.
"You don't have to create the culture because it already exists," Richvalsky said of the program in its fourth decade under Carol Hutchins. "So you're coming to Michigan with the idea that this is a program that thrives off of being together. It's something you feel. That was something that really attracted me to the program, the sense of togetherness and everyone celebrating each other's success and working hard."
Working harder than most may realize. Richvalsky missed the 2014 season after she had surgery on both shins to correct chronic shin splints and tendinitis. She was on crutches for six months after the procedures, went through up to three sessions of rehab per day and stayed in Ann Arbor for a summer to continue her recovery. All of that with the knowledge that all that awaited her, certainly in the short term, were some opportunities to pinch run. She's batted just seven times in the team's 62 games entering the World Series.
Six months on crutches to get a chance to run the bases seems a steep price to pay if the supposition is that all the dancing and the dugout routines suggest a lack of seriousness.
There are programs where even those expressions are not part of the culture, where dugouts are more reserved and more in line with what people see in a sport like baseball. That's as it should be. There are players who want and respond to that experience. But there are also players whose competitiveness finds outlets that softball uniquely affords.
"Personally, I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much [without the dugout culture]," Richvalsky said. "It's something that we wholeheartedly embrace. It's part of what makes our team so special, and it's given us our presence on and off the field. That's something I'm so proud to be a part of. I think that's really made my experience here so incredible."
The question for softball increasingly seems to be one of where the line should be drawn, the idea that, as with all good things, someone will take things too far and ruin the fun for everyone else. What you won't see from Richvalsky or Michigan are props that otherwise wouldn't be found in a dugout (at least beyond the invisible pepperoni). Props aren't their style. Alabama has for years prided itself on drawing warnings from umpires for using objects to create noise in the dugout, but the Tide use those tools already at their disposal. Florida players wear rally caps, an old baseball staple, or fashion faux glasses out of paper cups with the bottoms cut out. But in addition to all of those means of expression, more and more dugouts have become home to more props than a repertory theater.
Perhaps fittingly for the team from the home of Mardi Gras, no team in the World Series comes with quite as many accoutrement as LSU. Peer into its dugout during even tense moments in a game -- and you can be sure the camera will -- and you'll see everything from an Iron Man mask to a Dr. Seuss hat and a telephone perched atop the head (UCLA has gone a similar, if more pun-heavy, route in recent weeks, at times employing props like fruit to reinforce the idea that it wants to, ahem, produce). For LSU, the genesis may have been a Halloween practice this past fall when players took the field in costumes.
"It seems like that relaxes us, a bunch of goofy girls," shortstop Bianka Bell said in March. "Previous seasons, we pressed too much and would get ourselves out. Now we're staying more relaxed, and we have things that are helping us in not putting so much pressure on each other."
Like the costumes and props, teams across the country have also used surges in both televised softball and the concepts of photobombing and videobombing to start a competition in background pranks during the in-game interviews with coaches -- everything from funny faces to complex choreography in which several players carry teammates who pretend to swim.
The NCAA, while not instituting a ban on the background antics, effectively quashed them during super regionals with instructions to on-site representatives to emphasize respect for the interviews and by positioning coaches so as to minimize exposure.
Those instructions remain in place for the World Series.
In theory, although there is no suggestion it will, the NCAA presumably could also put an end to the dugout attire, citing rule 3.1.2 and its language that coaches are responsible for ensuring players are "properly attired to reflect a positive image of the game."
But there's the rub. Reflect a positive image to whom? And whose standard of positive?
Even if not about adherence to a rule about equipment, if only about the dancing and the chanting, some will say the antics lead people unfamiliar with the sport, like those who come across it during the World Series, to take it less seriously. And there are plenty of people who have spent a lifetime in the sport who are themselves uneasy at the sight of someone in a dugout wearing an inflatable flotation toy (you won't see it this week, but they are out there). At some point, a mind only has so much energy, and that spent adjusting a mask presumably can't go to details more germane to runs and outs.
There must be a line out there that should not be crossed, a border at which a privilege unearned is mistaken for a right and abused, but it is a difficult survey job to locate it.
"I've definitely had it criticized," Gaffin said of her dancing and demeanor. "But at the same time, I know myself well enough to know when it's time to do it and when it's time to not. It took me a while to find that middle ground, but I definitely understand it more."
The Women's College World Series is literally business. Some teams arrived in Oklahoma City on charter flights. The games are all on national television. The stands at Hall of Fame Stadium, itself undergoing renovations at least partly due to demands created by the success of the event, will be packed with paying customers. Outfielders won't pick dandelions and losers won't be mollified with cookies and orange slices.
But perhaps the best thing about the event, one of the best things about college softball, is the ability of its best players and teams to take competition seriously without in turn taking themselves too seriously. Maintaining that balance is the challenge.
To be in Oklahoma City is to have committed a great many hours and a great deal of effort to something, whether that is espnW player of the year Sierra Romero or her roommate who pinch runs on surgically repaired shins.
But it's worth remembering that what they committed to is ultimately a game.
"When we were little, the cheers kept us in the game," Richvalsky said. "They were really fun. It was a fun way to kind of get your energy out while you're out there. But now it's kind of how we create our energy; it's how we stay loose during the game.
"It's something that I guess brings us back to the fun part of the game."
Imagine that.