OKLAHOMA CITY — Texas and Oklahoma will see each other again soon enough when they both link up with their new home in the SEC in July.

For now, however, the Sooners are in a league of their own.

Come to think of it, maybe the Longhorns should just stick around the Big 12 longer and wave goodbye to the Sooners. But even then, they’d still have to find a way to get past them in the postseason.

OU softball is just that good. Rather, great. With sustained greatness.

Can you say four-peat? For Pete’s sake, Sooners, you’ve proved your point.

Enough already.

They went out of their way this time, whipping Texas 8-4 Thursday night to sweep the two Women's College World Series games in the final round and become the first Division I softball team to win four consecutive national championships. Is there any limit to OU’s greed?

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Texas, at least on the last two nights, was not worthy. But neither were 284 other teams this season.

There's swagger, and then there's OU swagger

It’s not exactly an exclusive club because OU has clearly separated itself from the field. And I mean the entire field as this dynasty shows no signs of dissipating and the Sooners celebrate tying Arizona with their eighth crown, just four behind UCLA. Texas, meanwhile, still longs to win one.

The Sooners had too much pop in their bats. Too many experienced veterans. Too many fans in the stands. Too much Kelly Maxwell, the most outstanding player of the series, who shut the door with four quick outs for the save. Too much everything.

There’s swagger, and then there’s OU swagger. The Sooners dare you to beat them.

Texas' national runner-up finish a bittersweet end

The Longhorns now must lick their wounds, bid adieu thankfully to OU's 10 seniors and wait till next year or until coach Patty Gasso retires when she’s 90. Her senior class, which included stars such as Tiare Jennings, Jayda Coleman, Kinzie Hansen and Rylie Boone, won four straight championships and lost only four NCAA Tournament games with 41 wins during their impressive run.

But even then, Kasidi Pickering and Ella Parker drove in four runs with a home run and a double, respectively. Oh, and those two Sooners are freshmen.

Is there no end to the crimson talent?

More: Oklahoma softball tops Texas, completes sweep in Women's College World Series championship

Texas coach Mike White praised OU but noted that Gasso’s team had five All-Americans to the Longhorns’ one, Reese Atwood, who struggled the entire Series with only three hits in five games and without a homer or an RBI.

“So for us to be in the same ballpark and play the game the way we did against that kind of odds, I mean, how do we only get one All-American anyway?” White said. “That tells us that we don't have a superstar other than Reese this year. We did this because we worked together, played together, they believed in each other.”

But in the end, that wasn’t enough.

Finishing second is no cause for shame against the machine that the 62-year-old Gasso has built. As testament to the Longhorns’ spectacular season, this was only the second time they’d lost two games in a row.

But it has to be getting a bit old for Texas, young as it is, with only four seniors on the roster and five underclassmen in the starting lineup.

The bittersweet ending included much more bitter in the moment because Texas is softball’s national runner-up for the second time in three years after coming into this tournament as the top seed and winning its first three WCWS games, all by shutouts.

“We know how tough it is to get here, much less win it four times in a row,” White said. “It’s an incredible feat.”

Texas' to-do's: find bigger bats, develop better pitching

His Longhorns might be sick and tired of coming so close, especially after wresting the Big 12 title from their crimson archrivals and beating them two out of three in Austin.

But he needs bigger bats. And a big impact from the nation’s fourth-ranked recruiting class, especially All-America pitcher Cambria Salmon from Beaumont, Calif. And maybe a change of WCWS venue because the crowd of 12,324 included possibly a thousand or two Longhorns supporters amid all the Sooner faithful.

“Obviously coming into a hostile environment, 12,000 Oklahoma fans, it's not easy when you're a band of about a thousand,” White said. “We didn't have a superstar pitcher. As great as our pitching staff was, they were one-dimensional. We have to work on that. They have to come out and throw different pitches at different locations.”

And Texas should have a better chance of unseating the champs in 2025 because the bulk of this 55-10 club will return, especially ace Teagan Kavan and sluggers Atwood and Mia Scott.

Scott, however, might have to exorcise some demons before then. Her daring gamble in the sixth inning to cut short a budding Texas rally could haunt her awhile even though a three-run outburst by OU in the bottom of the inning made it moot as it put the Sooners up 8-4.

Scott had driven in a run on an infield single to make it 5-4. But she risked too much by friskily dancing off first base and was easily tagged for the third out with the tying run at third.

Scott wasn't made available to the media, but White called it “a big moment in the game.” She's as good a player as there is for Texas but just made a costly base-running mistake that sealed its fate.

"No one feels worse than Mia Scott," White said. "She's already beating herself up. She was goading them. She's just cheeky. That's who she is, really aggressive."

It was more than a footnote but not nearly as noteworthy as the inability of UT's pitchers to contain the dynamic OU bats. Texas tried starter Mac Morgan and two relievers to try to quell the Sooners, to no avail.

Over the two games in the championship series, the Sooners drubbed Texas’ strong pitchers for 16 runs on 21 hits and made any late UT uprisings academic. OU proved to be relentless, scoring in eight of its 13 innings. The Sooners went down in order in just one inning, an anomaly for sure.

The Longhorns came close again, but there’s substantial work to be done.

“We're still growing as a team,” said pitcher Citlaly Gutierrez, who gave up three runs in the sixth to allow OU some breathing room before the crimson celebration. “They do have a lot of veterans. We're pretty young, still learning and growing. We've proved a lot this year, so I think we're still coming up.”

They are. But they also have to hope OU eventually comes down from its perch.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Longhorns fall as Sooners win fourth straight WCWS softball crown