Everyone was aware of the situation. Arizona State and Florida State were tied at 38 with 16 of the 17 events scored.
Everything was at stake when Jimmie Gordon stepped into the blocks for the final race of the evening, the final race of the championships and the final race of his collegiate indoor career.
The Seminoles' quartet had already made their statement with a 3:07.47 that had the ACC team champions in second place and in prime position to win their first ever NCAA indoor title after coming up five points short a year ago.
Sun Devil head coach Greg Kraft looked on as his senior All-American shot out of the blocks and around the banked first turn on the track at the Tyson Indoor Facility.
"In the moment, you feel like you always have a chance," Kraft said. "We've had great relays where a guy had dropped the stick or run on the line. In that race, I was watching the kids compete, but I was also looking out for yellow flags."
The nerves didn't show, though. After all, just a few minutes earlier, his Sun Devil women's program had clinched its second consecutive NCAA team title.
The women's victory was a little less dramatic. The Devils only fielded one individual champion during their '08 title defense in Jacquelyn Johnson, but ASU had eight scorers in Arkansas – four in the top-three – before runners made their marks for the 4x4.
Just like their title run in 2007, the Devils took an early lead on the field when Johnson won the pentathlon.
"We had Jacquelyn, which pretty much meant we had 10 points right from the start," 15-year Sun Devil pole vault coach Ron Barela said. "That was a good way to open every national championship. We knew we had 10 points from her before the meet really began."
Barela wasn't exaggerating.
Johnson, a multi-event athlete, was a five-time NCAA champion coming into her senior season in 2008. She hadn't left a championship meet without gracing the top of the podium since her first ever NCAA competition. And in that, then a true freshman, she finished second to an eventual Beijing silver-medalist.
"No matter how great the team was, in my mind, it was always Jackie Johnson's team," Kraft said. "There was Sarah Stevens and Jessica Pressley and other women who were national champions, but when you think about someone who gets eight opportunities to win national titles and comes away with seven, that becomes the centerpiece for you."
She got her sixth title that weekend, and would go on to win a seventh during the outdoor season, and her 10 points put the Devils up early. But Johnson's weekend wasn't over. She still had the long jump and the high jump left.
Johnson was the only woman tripling that weekend, but two other Devils were doubling. Both Stevens and Pressley were on throws duty.
The two finished runner-up in the shot put and weight throw, respectively, while Pressley also scored a fifth-place finish in the shot put.
"I can see it like it was yesterday," Kraft said. "Those teams with Amy Hastings, Jackie, Sarah and Jessica. The day of the meet, I typically didn't have to say anything to them because I knew they would take care of business."
That 2008 title also came with redemption for pole vaulter April Kubishta.
A senior at the time, Kubishta was the defending champion in the event outdoors, but an indoor title – let alone a first-team All-America place – had always seemed to evade her.
"I think April could have won it two or three years in-a-row – She was that good," Barela said. "But two of those years, she came down with the flu at the meet and kind of had to be quarantined. It was that bad."
Kubishta was a part of that 2007 title-winning team, but came up short in her event, finishing 11th, despite entering the meet as the favorite.
"The year before, she was the No. 1 seed," Kraft said. "We won the national title, but she didn't score and I remember she was devastated, and she's not an emotional person – she was a math major – but she just felt so bad that she didn't score."
She finished second in 2008 and scored eight points for the Devils. Eight points that would prove to be vital in the end.
"That next year, she was able to step up for us," Kraft said. "That's the thing about that team, though – The women just had a great amount of confidence in themselves and in each other."
By the time the title was clinched, ASU had scored 45 points before the 4x400-meter relay quartet of Domonique Maloy, Shauntel Elcock, Jordan Durham and Jeavon Benjamin scored six more by finishing third.
"During that era, LSU had really good teams, so for our women it was a challenge," Kraft said.
The Tigers of LSU finished second that year. They scored 43. ASU won the title by eight points.
Kubishta's tally in the pole vault pushed the Devils over the top. The team wouldn't have left Fayetteville with the first-place trophy without her points. But that redemption was fitting for ASU. Kraft had seen it the year before from Hastings.
"I remember in 2006 Amy won the 5,000 and came back in the 3,000 the next night and just really looked awful," Kraft said. "She didn't even score."
She finished 19th out of the 20 runners in the 3K almost 24 hours after she had outclassed the field in the 5,000.
"When we won in '07, she finished fourth in the 5,000 and I went to see what her mood was after the race," Kraft said. "She was livid, but I told her we were going to need her in the 3,000 the next day.
"She went out there and finished sixth by passing a couple people down the homestretch to win us a national championship."
Those three points that Hastings scored mathematically eliminated LSU and Tennessee from title contention even with one event left to go, and gave Kraft and his Sun Devils their first ever
NCAA title.
"She ran around the track, off the track and then up into the stands where our team was to celebrate," Kraft said. "She didn't stop because she knew she'd won it for us.
"The year before, we had to pull her off the track because she was dead and that 5,000-3,000 is an incredibly difficult double," Kraft said. "But that moment and that group of people just had an energy you can't put into words."
Hastings would go on to become the first American woman in more than three decades to medal in the marathon at the IAAF World Championships in 2017. She wasn't on that 2008 squad, but ASU found points in other events to hold off LSU for a second-straight year.
Along with Johnson's pentathlon crown, she finished fifth in the long jump and ASU's Stephanie Garnett took sixth.
"When you look back at our team 10 years ago, we had kids here who all worked together," Barela said. "There was a sense of camaraderie there that's hard to find. They knew that it took everybody. They knew they couldn't be a one-person team because one person can't win it all. April had to do well, Jacquelyn had to do well, they all had to perform well for us to win."
That camaraderie was evident on both squads.
"When you have that many people on a men's and women's team there, you really create a lot of energy for each other," Kraft said. "With the buzz of the athletes, they all knew it was on. Everyone understood what the moment was and the opportunity we had been afforded."
That opportunity in 2008 was a sweep, and it became a possibility Friday night in Fayetteville.
The men's team, that had finished 25th at the same meet in 2007, had already more than doubled their point-total from their last outing with a whole day of competition to go.
"I think it was a little surprising on the men's side," Sun Devil cross country coach Jeremy Rasmussen said. "They weren't really expected to win, and for them to be able to come together as a group and be able to get the ball rolling in some of the events on Friday really helped shift the momentum and help them go."
Rasmussen was the distance coach at Illinois at the time, but was a member of the coaching staff for the Sun Devils' women's title in 2007.
Although he wasn't on the staff in 2008, Rasmussen still had a connection to that monumental men's team. A senior he had worked with the past few seasons: Kyle Alcorn.
"The stars did align for us," Kraft said. "I remember with the DMR, Texas had a great medley and Leo Manzano was the anchor for them and the favorite in the mile. He was way out ahead and he knew he had a great kick so he slowed the race down significantly and allowed us to catch back up."
Alcorn was the Devils' anchor leg for that event, and he was also entered in the open 3,000-meter run that would take place the following evening.
"I had the opportunity to chat with Kyle a little bit and wish him good luck prior to the race," Rasmussen said. "To be able to see him do really well in the DMR and anchor that team to second was special."
That team of Joey Heller, Justin Kremer, Nectaly Barbosa and Alcorn ran a then school record 9:32.49. Alcorn took the baton in fifth place and ran his mile leg in 3:58.13 to put the Devils into contention for the title for the first time in school history.
"Those eight points were huge," Kraft said. "I remember Ryan Whiting coming up to me right after the race and asking, 'does this give us a chance?' I told him 'oh, yeah, we've got a chance now.'"
With 19 points heading into Saturday, the groundwork was laid for history.
"Jimmie Gordon and Joel Phillips had already qualified for the 400-meter final and things were kind of falling into place," Kraft said. "The same thing happened with the 3K the next day. Everybody kind of knew it could happen and it really makes a difference when there's a team there fighting for the same thing."
In that 3K, just like the DMR, Alcorn was right at home with the pace.
"The race was slow, and I knew that when races are slow he's dangerous because he's got a tremendous kick," Rasmussen said. "They left the door wide open for him and he took advantage of that and was able to win that 3,000."
Alcorn's title in the 3K was the ASU men's second of the meet. The first came the day before from Whiting.
"You could feel the energy build after each event," Barela said. "Every person there, whether they scored or not, they were the greatest cheerleaders. And I don't know if we really had any surprises. All of the kids we took there belonged there."
Whiting's shot put title came with a collegiate record. It's a record that still stands today and has only been matched once.
Joel Phillip had the weekend of his life, according to Kraft. He would go on to finish second in the 400 final, and Gordon would take eighth.
Matt Turner also took a point for the Devils in the long jump, and after Alcorn crossed the finish line in the 3,000 in first-place, the relay showdown for indoor supremacy was set up.
The Devils were in the third and final heat of the event. It was projected to be the fastest heat, but as Florida State had just proven in what was expected to be the slowest heat, anything can happen at the NCAA Championships.
All Gordon, Darryl Elston, Justin Kremer and Phillip had to do was run faster than FSU, something only one team had done up to that point in the evening.
They finished third and all four entrants in the third heat pushed the Seminoles down to sixth to lock up ASU's first men's indoor team title in school history and only the second sweep indoors in collegiate history.
"After it happened, I didn't even see the women's 4x4," Kraft said. "The guys had won and I was celebrating with the rest of the team the fact that we had won both."
That sweep was the peak of one of ASU's most successful eras.
"It was a lot of fun to be a part of that period," Rasmussen said. "We were going to the national championships, not just with individual aspirations, but as a team. Everybody was really vying to help the team be successful and win a national title or bring home a trophy.
"I think those experiences really brought the team together. It allowed everyone to get to know each other really well," Rasmussen said.
"The leadership we had back then was very strong," Barela said. "When I joined the staff in 2004, I signed on because I looked at the roster and what we were doing in recruiting and knew that I had a chance to be a part of something special. We had it all. We had throwers, jumpers, distance runners, sprinters. We could score in anything."
Those teams fielded some of the greatest athletes to ever come through the Sun Devil program.
"The neat thing about it was to see the type of careers those student-athletes have had subsequent to that in the previous ten years," Kraft said. "It's remarkable how someone like Ryan Whiting is still competing at that high level, and Amy Hastings is making history."
Johnson would go on to represent the United States in the Beijing Olympics later that year. Whiting, Alcorn and Hastings (now Cragg) would wear the stars and stripes in London four years later, while Kubishta, Stevens, Johnson, and Whiting would all earn Academic All-America honors.
"I think that's a thing the general public doesn't have an appreciation for," Kraft said. "Those kids weren't just great athletes. They were great students and just really great people."
Everything was at stake when Jimmie Gordon stepped into the blocks for the final race of the evening, the final race of the championships and the final race of his collegiate indoor career.
The Seminoles' quartet had already made their statement with a 3:07.47 that had the ACC team champions in second place and in prime position to win their first ever NCAA indoor title after coming up five points short a year ago.
Sun Devil head coach Greg Kraft looked on as his senior All-American shot out of the blocks and around the banked first turn on the track at the Tyson Indoor Facility.
"In the moment, you feel like you always have a chance," Kraft said. "We've had great relays where a guy had dropped the stick or run on the line. In that race, I was watching the kids compete, but I was also looking out for yellow flags."
The nerves didn't show, though. After all, just a few minutes earlier, his Sun Devil women's program had clinched its second consecutive NCAA team title.
The women's victory was a little less dramatic. The Devils only fielded one individual champion during their '08 title defense in Jacquelyn Johnson, but ASU had eight scorers in Arkansas – four in the top-three – before runners made their marks for the 4x4.
Just like their title run in 2007, the Devils took an early lead on the field when Johnson won the pentathlon.
"We had Jacquelyn, which pretty much meant we had 10 points right from the start," 15-year Sun Devil pole vault coach Ron Barela said. "That was a good way to open every national championship. We knew we had 10 points from her before the meet really began."
Barela wasn't exaggerating.
Johnson, a multi-event athlete, was a five-time NCAA champion coming into her senior season in 2008. She hadn't left a championship meet without gracing the top of the podium since her first ever NCAA competition. And in that, then a true freshman, she finished second to an eventual Beijing silver-medalist.
"No matter how great the team was, in my mind, it was always Jackie Johnson's team," Kraft said. "There was Sarah Stevens and Jessica Pressley and other women who were national champions, but when you think about someone who gets eight opportunities to win national titles and comes away with seven, that becomes the centerpiece for you."
She got her sixth title that weekend, and would go on to win a seventh during the outdoor season, and her 10 points put the Devils up early. But Johnson's weekend wasn't over. She still had the long jump and the high jump left.
Johnson was the only woman tripling that weekend, but two other Devils were doubling. Both Stevens and Pressley were on throws duty.
The two finished runner-up in the shot put and weight throw, respectively, while Pressley also scored a fifth-place finish in the shot put.
"I can see it like it was yesterday," Kraft said. "Those teams with Amy Hastings, Jackie, Sarah and Jessica. The day of the meet, I typically didn't have to say anything to them because I knew they would take care of business."
That 2008 title also came with redemption for pole vaulter April Kubishta.
A senior at the time, Kubishta was the defending champion in the event outdoors, but an indoor title – let alone a first-team All-America place – had always seemed to evade her.
"I think April could have won it two or three years in-a-row – She was that good," Barela said. "But two of those years, she came down with the flu at the meet and kind of had to be quarantined. It was that bad."
Kubishta was a part of that 2007 title-winning team, but came up short in her event, finishing 11th, despite entering the meet as the favorite.
"The year before, she was the No. 1 seed," Kraft said. "We won the national title, but she didn't score and I remember she was devastated, and she's not an emotional person – she was a math major – but she just felt so bad that she didn't score."
She finished second in 2008 and scored eight points for the Devils. Eight points that would prove to be vital in the end.
"That next year, she was able to step up for us," Kraft said. "That's the thing about that team, though – The women just had a great amount of confidence in themselves and in each other."
By the time the title was clinched, ASU had scored 45 points before the 4x400-meter relay quartet of Domonique Maloy, Shauntel Elcock, Jordan Durham and Jeavon Benjamin scored six more by finishing third.
"During that era, LSU had really good teams, so for our women it was a challenge," Kraft said.
The Tigers of LSU finished second that year. They scored 43. ASU won the title by eight points.
Kubishta's tally in the pole vault pushed the Devils over the top. The team wouldn't have left Fayetteville with the first-place trophy without her points. But that redemption was fitting for ASU. Kraft had seen it the year before from Hastings.
"I remember in 2006 Amy won the 5,000 and came back in the 3,000 the next night and just really looked awful," Kraft said. "She didn't even score."
She finished 19th out of the 20 runners in the 3K almost 24 hours after she had outclassed the field in the 5,000.
"When we won in '07, she finished fourth in the 5,000 and I went to see what her mood was after the race," Kraft said. "She was livid, but I told her we were going to need her in the 3,000 the next day.
"She went out there and finished sixth by passing a couple people down the homestretch to win us a national championship."
Those three points that Hastings scored mathematically eliminated LSU and Tennessee from title contention even with one event left to go, and gave Kraft and his Sun Devils their first ever
NCAA title.
"She ran around the track, off the track and then up into the stands where our team was to celebrate," Kraft said. "She didn't stop because she knew she'd won it for us.
"The year before, we had to pull her off the track because she was dead and that 5,000-3,000 is an incredibly difficult double," Kraft said. "But that moment and that group of people just had an energy you can't put into words."
Hastings would go on to become the first American woman in more than three decades to medal in the marathon at the IAAF World Championships in 2017. She wasn't on that 2008 squad, but ASU found points in other events to hold off LSU for a second-straight year.
Along with Johnson's pentathlon crown, she finished fifth in the long jump and ASU's Stephanie Garnett took sixth.
"When you look back at our team 10 years ago, we had kids here who all worked together," Barela said. "There was a sense of camaraderie there that's hard to find. They knew that it took everybody. They knew they couldn't be a one-person team because one person can't win it all. April had to do well, Jacquelyn had to do well, they all had to perform well for us to win."
That camaraderie was evident on both squads.
"When you have that many people on a men's and women's team there, you really create a lot of energy for each other," Kraft said. "With the buzz of the athletes, they all knew it was on. Everyone understood what the moment was and the opportunity we had been afforded."
That opportunity in 2008 was a sweep, and it became a possibility Friday night in Fayetteville.
The men's team, that had finished 25th at the same meet in 2007, had already more than doubled their point-total from their last outing with a whole day of competition to go.
"I think it was a little surprising on the men's side," Sun Devil cross country coach Jeremy Rasmussen said. "They weren't really expected to win, and for them to be able to come together as a group and be able to get the ball rolling in some of the events on Friday really helped shift the momentum and help them go."
Rasmussen was the distance coach at Illinois at the time, but was a member of the coaching staff for the Sun Devils' women's title in 2007.
Although he wasn't on the staff in 2008, Rasmussen still had a connection to that monumental men's team. A senior he had worked with the past few seasons: Kyle Alcorn.
"The stars did align for us," Kraft said. "I remember with the DMR, Texas had a great medley and Leo Manzano was the anchor for them and the favorite in the mile. He was way out ahead and he knew he had a great kick so he slowed the race down significantly and allowed us to catch back up."
Alcorn was the Devils' anchor leg for that event, and he was also entered in the open 3,000-meter run that would take place the following evening.
"I had the opportunity to chat with Kyle a little bit and wish him good luck prior to the race," Rasmussen said. "To be able to see him do really well in the DMR and anchor that team to second was special."
That team of Joey Heller, Justin Kremer, Nectaly Barbosa and Alcorn ran a then school record 9:32.49. Alcorn took the baton in fifth place and ran his mile leg in 3:58.13 to put the Devils into contention for the title for the first time in school history.
"Those eight points were huge," Kraft said. "I remember Ryan Whiting coming up to me right after the race and asking, 'does this give us a chance?' I told him 'oh, yeah, we've got a chance now.'"
With 19 points heading into Saturday, the groundwork was laid for history.
"Jimmie Gordon and Joel Phillips had already qualified for the 400-meter final and things were kind of falling into place," Kraft said. "The same thing happened with the 3K the next day. Everybody kind of knew it could happen and it really makes a difference when there's a team there fighting for the same thing."
In that 3K, just like the DMR, Alcorn was right at home with the pace.
"The race was slow, and I knew that when races are slow he's dangerous because he's got a tremendous kick," Rasmussen said. "They left the door wide open for him and he took advantage of that and was able to win that 3,000."
Alcorn's title in the 3K was the ASU men's second of the meet. The first came the day before from Whiting.
"You could feel the energy build after each event," Barela said. "Every person there, whether they scored or not, they were the greatest cheerleaders. And I don't know if we really had any surprises. All of the kids we took there belonged there."
Whiting's shot put title came with a collegiate record. It's a record that still stands today and has only been matched once.
Joel Phillip had the weekend of his life, according to Kraft. He would go on to finish second in the 400 final, and Gordon would take eighth.
Matt Turner also took a point for the Devils in the long jump, and after Alcorn crossed the finish line in the 3,000 in first-place, the relay showdown for indoor supremacy was set up.
The Devils were in the third and final heat of the event. It was projected to be the fastest heat, but as Florida State had just proven in what was expected to be the slowest heat, anything can happen at the NCAA Championships.
All Gordon, Darryl Elston, Justin Kremer and Phillip had to do was run faster than FSU, something only one team had done up to that point in the evening.
They finished third and all four entrants in the third heat pushed the Seminoles down to sixth to lock up ASU's first men's indoor team title in school history and only the second sweep indoors in collegiate history.
"After it happened, I didn't even see the women's 4x4," Kraft said. "The guys had won and I was celebrating with the rest of the team the fact that we had won both."
That sweep was the peak of one of ASU's most successful eras.
"It was a lot of fun to be a part of that period," Rasmussen said. "We were going to the national championships, not just with individual aspirations, but as a team. Everybody was really vying to help the team be successful and win a national title or bring home a trophy.
"I think those experiences really brought the team together. It allowed everyone to get to know each other really well," Rasmussen said.
"The leadership we had back then was very strong," Barela said. "When I joined the staff in 2004, I signed on because I looked at the roster and what we were doing in recruiting and knew that I had a chance to be a part of something special. We had it all. We had throwers, jumpers, distance runners, sprinters. We could score in anything."
Those teams fielded some of the greatest athletes to ever come through the Sun Devil program.
"The neat thing about it was to see the type of careers those student-athletes have had subsequent to that in the previous ten years," Kraft said. "It's remarkable how someone like Ryan Whiting is still competing at that high level, and Amy Hastings is making history."
Johnson would go on to represent the United States in the Beijing Olympics later that year. Whiting, Alcorn and Hastings (now Cragg) would wear the stars and stripes in London four years later, while Kubishta, Stevens, Johnson, and Whiting would all earn Academic All-America honors.
"I think that's a thing the general public doesn't have an appreciation for," Kraft said. "Those kids weren't just great athletes. They were great students and just really great people."