NATCHITOCHES – All weekends in the Southland Conference baseball race are created equal in Lane Burroughs' eyes.
 
For at least one member of Burroughs' staff, however, this weekend's matchup against McNeese State, which begins at 6:30 p.m. Friday at Brown-Stroud Field, holds a little more interest.
 
The three-game series against the Cowboys (16-9, 6-3 Southland) serves as reunion weekend for the Demons (14-10, 6-2), who will honor the 1995 and 2005 NSU squads.
 
Those teams each won Southland Conference championships, and the 2005 squad reached the NCAA Baton Rouge Regional.
 
"It will be good to see everybody," said pitching coach Bobby Barbier, a starter on the 2005 squad. "You'd like to keep in touch with everybody you've played with, but it gets hard. We've gone our separate ways and have different lives now. It's exciting to get everyone back."
 
When the Demons and Cowboys meet, there will be another reason Barbier will be happy to see his teammates and those who came before him.
 
"As a player, I know when other teams who won championships came back it gave you a sense of pride," Barbier said. "You're not playing for just yourself. Our guys get a chance to see how much it means to these 25 or 30 or however many show up for the reunion weekend."
 
As a junior on coach Mitch Gaspard's 2005 team, Barbier had experienced the same type of building process Lane Burroughs has instituted in his three years at the helm of the Demons program.
 
Barbier and his teammates broke through in Year 3, winning the second Southland Conference championship of Gaspard's tenure.
 
Through the first three weekends of conference play, the current Demons are a half-game behind league-leading Southeastern Louisiana, which is NSU's next conference foe.
 
"There was a sense of team," Barbier said. "We played for each other. It was a group very similar to the one we run out now. We had three starters on the weekend, no ifs ands or buts. We had a really good midweek starter in Rusty Jones. We had two guys in the back of the game we can always count on. We had older players who had at-bats in the league. Our league is an older man's league. The team with the most experience, the most at-bats, those are teams that normally do well."
 
What stands out most to Barbier a decade later isn't a play he made or a swing he took. As reunion weekend arrives, his favorite memories are more about the journey – both literally and figuratively – toward the Southland Conference championship and a trip to the NCAA Regional in Baton Rouge.
 
It is a journey he is reminded of as he looks at the 2015 Demons, who have 21 conference games left to see if they can continue the NSU tradition of winning championships at the midpoint of three straight decades.
 
"Going to the regional was great," Barbier said. "That was a good reward for that team. I remember that team, the feeling of every time we got beat was, 'How could that ever happen to us?' It was different than any other team I played on. It was, 'How did we let that one slip away?' We honestly thought we were going to win every single game we played. We went into some big-name schools and beat them on their own field.
 
"Winning the conference championship at Nicholls State with one full weekend to go, that was pretty special. That ride home was a pretty special ride with a bunch of guys who had been together for a long time."
 
All three games of the series will be broadcast on the Demon Sports Network, flagshipped by 100.7 KZBL in Natchitoches. Free audio is available at NSUDemons.com. Patrick Netherton will deliver the play-by-play.
 
 Friday: Kaleb Fontentot (3-2. 2.94) vs. Adam Oller (3-1, 1.85)
Saturday: Trent Fontenot (3-1, 2.67) vs. Josh Oller (5-0, 4.17)
Sunday: Ethan Stremmel (3-2, 3.94) vs. Jeffrey Stovall (3-2, 4.02)