Men's College World Series - How the Arkansas Razorbacks played a role in Brady Luke's recovery

OMAHA, Neb. — Lisa Luke was 36 weeks pregnant when she found out her unborn son had hypoplastic left heart syndrome. A surgeon told her not to Google it, but of course she had to, and she saw all the agonizing stories about the congenital disease.

But doctors told her to let her son Brady live the life of a normal boy — to dig up worms, wrestle with his brother and have fun. Fourteen years later, Brady Luke was in the stands on Saturday at the Men's College World Series, eating snow cones and sunflower seeds and learning the «Woo Pig Sooie» chant.

Brady is an Arkansas baseball fan.

The Omaha family's love of the Razorbacks started in 2012, during another Arkansas MCWS run. Brady was 4 years old and about a week removed from his third heart surgery when a host of participating teams visited him at Children's Hospital.

The Razorbacks spent an hour and a half with Brady, chatting, coloring and playing a game the boy invented called «Elevator Races» in which the participants had to pick which hospital elevator would open first.

«The way they interacted with him, you could tell that they cared,» his mother said. «They got him, I think, as a kid, and knew that maybe this was something he needed.

»After they left, he had that little pep in his step, like, 'Hey mom, here's all these big guys that play on TV and they came to talk to me and hang out with me and stuff.'"

Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, according to the Mayo Clinic, is a rare heart defect in which the left side of the heart is critically underdeveloped and can't effectively pump blood to the body. Brady had his first surgery when he was 7 days old and another at 2½ months. Brady had some tubes in him after the third operation in 2012, and Brian and Lisa Luke tried