Daniel Bibona had a little something for Nebraska’s best-laid plans at Haymarket Park Saturday night.

Matched against Johnny Dorn after the Huskers saved their ace for the second game of the NCAA regional, the right-handed sophomore Bibona manned up for the pitching duel and threw the Anteaters into the driver’s seat.

After giving up a two-run homer to Jake Opitz with two outs in the third, Bibona held NU hitless through the eighth and yielded just one base runner the rest of the way to fuel Irvine to a 3-2 victory in front of 8,646.

"Towards the end, I really felt like my slider-fastball command was good, and I fed off the crowd," said Bibona, who gave up just four hits and two walks during his career-long outing. "In the beginning, it was a little overwhelming. I've never pitched in an atmosphere like that before, (but) when they were all clapping in the seventh or eighth inning I felt like they were clapping for me."

Saturday night’s result put the Anteaters in the championship round of the double-elimination tourney. Nebraska and Oral Roberts, both 1-1 in the event, meet at 1:05 p.m. today to determine which will play Irvine at 6:05.Should that team beat the Anteaters, it would force a final contest at 1:05 p.m. Monday.

The right-handed senior Dorn, In what was likely his final performance at Haymarket, was just as games as Bibona while scattering 11 hits and walking none.

But a 1-2 curveball to Ollie Linton with one out in the fifth inning proved to be his downfall, as the 5-foot-8, 160-pound, left-handed hitter pulled it high and into the right-field bullpen to break a 2-2 tie.

"I should've buried it," Dorn said. "It was 1-2, should've put in the ground and I didn't do that."

As luck would have it, that left Dorn with his second hard-to-swallow loss of the season, as in his only other setback he also went the distance in a 1-0 decision at Oklahoma State. Coincidentally, before Saturday, that was the only time in 10 games this season that the Huskers had come up short in a one-run contest.

"I certainly did not feel like, 'OK, we won't get any more or we can't get any more.' But on the other hand we realized that, boy, we just got a giant hit right here," Irvine coach Mike Gillespie said of Linton's fourth homer, which was only the fourth allowed this season by Dorn. "We felt like we had the right guy on the mound, we had our best defense on the field, so we felt like we were in the best position possible to protect that kind of a lead."

Behind Bibona and closer Eric Pettis, who worked a 1-2-3 ninth to record his second save of the regional and 17th this season, Irvine improved to 35-0 when leading after seven innings, and to 37-0 when ahead after the eighth.

Opitz's team-high 11th homer of the season came on a 3-2 slider from Bibona that he deposited on the grass behind right-center field. That erased a 1-0 deficit created when the Anteaters got consecutive two-out hits in the second inning by Casey Stevenson, Sean Madigan and Eric Deragisch.

Irvine (40-16) tied the game in the bottom of the third, when Ben Orloff doubled to right-center with one out and Jeff Cusick drove him in with a bloop single to shallow center.

Linton's big hit wasn't all that cheap.

"I got it really high, because it was a curveball that he threw down and in, and I just dropped the head of the bat," Linton said. "In that situation, I'm just trying to keep my same approach, and luckily I ran into a curveball that he left a little bit higher than he'd been during the game."

Nebraska (41-15-1) lost for just the fourth time in 33 games at Haymarket and now has to record a program first if it wants to advance to next weekend: Win a regional that it didn't start off 2-0.

"We've been there, we'll see," coach Mike Anderson said about the challenge. "It's a tough task."

A positive thinker would note that the Huskers have swept four times out of five this season when playing two games on the same day, and have taken four straight.

But Irvine, which got out of a ninth-inning jam on Friday to end Oral Roberts' 12-game winning streak and has now won five straight regional games, definitely has karma on its side.

Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.