CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The story of how Erik Paulsen Jr. ended up in Carolina blue starts on Long Island and runs through Brooklyn and an official visit to Chapel Hill and a diagnosis and a July morning that changed everything about what the next year of his life was going to look like.

Erik Paulsen Sr. was a homicide detective in the NYPD's 75th Precinct in Brooklyn. He played college baseball at Misericordia University and Farmingdale State. He owned two season tickets to Yankee Stadium. He was the kind of man who showed up for every game and remembered every at-bat and loved the sport with a completeness that his son describes as unlike anything he has seen in anyone else before or since.

When Erik Jr. decided to transfer from Stony Brook to North Carolina last summer, his father made the trip to Chapel Hill with him. He saw Boshamer Stadium. He saw the baby blue uniforms hanging in the locker room. He met the coaches. He told his son it was the right decision.

Then the cancer that had been advancing through Erik Sr.'s throat took over quickly. By July 4th, 2025, with his family gathered in the room, he was gone. He was 54 years old. His last words to his son were reported by ESPN's Ryan McGee in a feature published this week that has been read by more people than most things written about college baseball in years: "I cannot wait to see you in those baby blues."

Erik Jr. put on those blues for the first time on February 13, 2026, 225 days after his father's death. His family made the trip from Long Island to watch. The seat his father would have occupied was empty. It has been empty at every game since.

Last weekend in the Chapel Hill Regional, Paulsen was named the Most Outstanding Player after UNC swept three games, going 3-0 through Tennessee, East Carolina and VCU. He drove in five runs across the weekend including a two-RBI single in the second inning of the regional championship game against ECU. In the eighth inning of that game, with the Tar Heels ahead 7-3 and the building packed and loud, he hit a double down the right field line. When he trotted out to first base for the top of the ninth, he stood at his position and looked around Boshamer Stadium and let himself feel what was in front of him.

"I was wishing my dad was in the stands," he said afterward.

Head coach Scott Forbes looked over at his first baseman after that line and smiled. "That's an NYPD answer if I've ever heard one," Forbes said.

Tonight it is USC coming to Chapel Hill for a Super Regional, with a College World Series trip at stake. North Carolina, spending $38 million on its total NIL roster according to The Sideline's NIL Tracker at https://thesideline.co/nil-tracker, faces USC at $44 million, the team that clawed through the losers bracket of the College Station Regional to get here. Ryan Lynch, who threw seven two-hit shutout innings in the regional opener, starts Game 1 for the Tar Heels. The pitching matchup is clean and the stakes are as high as college baseball gets.

None of that is the story in Chapel Hill tonight. The story is a 21-year-old first baseman from Massapequa, New York, who transferred to a school he had never seen before to play in a stadium his father visited exactly once and loved immediately. The story is that Erik Paulsen Sr., a Brooklyn homicide detective and Yankee season-ticket holder and adult baseball league regular who treated the sport as something close to a religion, never got to see his son play a single inning as a Tar Heel.

"You would have loved him. Everyone did," Paulsen said this week. "He loved baseball more than anyone I've known, or you've ever known, trust me. He was my hero. And he was an American hero."

The game starts at three o'clock. Boshamer Stadium will be full. Section 115, where Paulsen's family sits, will be full too.

One seat will still be empty.