Thursday's postgame cookout for the Orioles players and staff didn't look much like a graduation ceremony — in lieu of "Pomp and Circumstance," there was a tub the size of a small canoe filled with potatoes and crawfish.
The only caps were the twist-offs from the bottles of beer, and gowns — there were no gowns.
But tucked inside the cabin of a truck that five fellow Nicholls State alumni drove overnight, hauling a trailer full of 450 pounds of fresh crawfish from Louisiana to Sarasota, was a diploma that was decades in the making for Orioles third base/infield coach Bobby Dickerson.