BOISE — There are some that don’t think the Boise State softball team should have earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament after finishing fifth in the Mountain West Conference standings.

The Broncos couldn’t care less.

Boise State received a somewhat surprising bid to the 64-team tournament Sunday night. It’s the second straight trip to the NCAA Tournament for the Broncos, and the first at-large bid in school history.

The Broncos earned the No. 3 seed in the Gainesville (Florida) Regional and open the double-elimination, four-team regional against No. 2 seed Stanford on Friday at 10 a.m. MDT on ESPNU. The top seed is the host school, the No. 5 overall seed Florida Gators.

“We do deserve to be in and that’s why we’re going and that’s why those other teams are not going,” senior Morgan Lamb said. “We belong in this NCAA Tournament and I’m just super excited to get to keep playing.”

After getting swept at Fresno State over the weekend to finish in fifth place in the conference standings, there wasn’t much hope for the Broncos to get in the tournament.

So much so that there was no official team watch party for Sunday’s selection show because coach Maggi Livreri didn’t want to get the group together only to have to suffer the heartbreak together.

“We were pretty nervous about the whole thing and obviously you are either super high or super low,” Livreri said. “I was watching it and I was a little behind on the feed, so I started getting texts prior to and I was like, ‘Wait a second, maybe we are in.’ It was pretty cool. The girls FaceTimed me and they were going wild.”

Many of the players got together at Lamb’s house to watch the show as they held out hope of getting back to the Big Dance — even though they figured the chances were slim. Boise State went 0-3 against Fresno State over the weekend and went just 12-12 in the Mountain West. Non-power conferences typically don’t get many at-large spots, and definitely not for a fifth-place team.

“I was kind of like, ‘This is it, it’s not happening,’” Lamb said. “But we were watching at my house and we were like, ‘That’s us! We’re going to Gainesville!’ We were all super pumped and screaming and we ran outside and I’m sure our neighbors were wondering what was going on.

“We’re just so pumped. It’s a great opportunity to play some more ball and as a senior going out, last weekend I kind of thought that was going to be it for me and I didn’t want to go off being swept by Fresno.”

Boise State went 34-14 during the regular season, including an 18-2 start prior to conference play. Included was a 17-game winning streak that featured wins over Boston College, Mississippi and Michigan State. The win over Ole Miss was the first win against an SEC school in program history.

But the defending Mountain West champions started struggling once conference play started and went just 12-12, finishing with three losses at Fresno State that seemingly ended all hope of getting back to the NCAA Tournament.

Regular-season champion Colorado State earned the automatic bid to the tournament (the Broncos went 2-1 against the Rams), but the other three teams that finished ahead of the Broncos in the standings all had strong cases to be included as well:

-San Jose State went 37-16, finished second in the Mountain West and was 3-0 against Boise State.

-UNLV finished 36-14 and in third place in the league standings and went 2-1 against Boise State.

-Fresno State went 36-18 and ranked fourth in the Mountain West and was 3-0 against Boise State.

The Broncos entered the final weekend with an RPI of No. 33, compared to San Jose State (47th), UNLV (44th) and Fresno State (73rd). The updated RPIs on Monday had the Broncos at No. 40, UNLV at No. 46, San Jose State at No. 48 and Fresno State at No. 61.

The early success and a challenging non-conference schedule ended up being the difference for the Broncos, much to the dismay of many fans from the other three schools that went to social media to voice their displeasure.

“Honestly, you could have convinced me either way,” said Livreri, who is in her first season as head coach. “You can make arguments either way. I wasn’t feeling great about the weekend obviously, so it was definitely nerve-racking.

“At the end of the day honestly, I think you could have had three, four teams get in (from the Mountain West). There’s other teams across the country that got in that probably hurt them, but early on and the body of work as a whole was something we obviously fell back on.”

The opening-round game against Stanford is a rematch of a game last season in which the Broncos lost 9-1. But both teams have changed plenty in 14 months and the Broncos are confident things will be different.

“We like that we’ve played Stanford and we think that’s somebody we can beat, or at least compete with, for sure,” Livreri said.

Boise State advanced to the first NCAA Tournament in school history last year and went 0-2 with losses to Washington and Minnesota in the Seattle regional. They are hoping that experience helps them to a different result this time around — even if it means going all the way to Florida to do so.

“Absolutely,” Livreri said. “I think that will show with us. Our girls will be ready to go and I think it will work in our favor. … The overall message is, we are good enough and we want to build a program that’s consistent and consistently (in the NCAA Tournament), so I think they are just excited to prove it to each other.”