…and an improbably awful result followed.

That isn’t the most reasonable interpretation of the shocking 10-4 loss Jay Johnson’s top-rated team, the No. 6 national seed in the NCAA Tournament which had rolled through its first two opponents at the Baton Rouge Regional with a pair of shutouts, took to an Arkansas-Little Rock team which had the worst RPI rating of anyone in the tournament.

Little Rock is now 27-33 on the season even despite winning eight of their last nine games. They’re certainly playing better than that record and they’re in the middle of one of the all-time Cinderella runs in the postseason, having barely even qualified for the Ohio Valley Conference tournament with an 8-16 league record in one of the weakest conferences in Division 1.

And LSU sent Jared Noot and then Chase Shores, a pair of pitchers who mostly shut down the No. 10 national seed Ole Miss a week ago in Hoover, Alabama at the SEC Tournament, against Little Rock only to watch them utterly, inexplicably stink out Alex Box Stadium as LSU fell behind 6-3. Then, after a good performance by freshman lefty Cooper Williams stabilized the game, righty Jacob Mayers, a major pro prospect who has been terrific of late, stunk out the joint even worse. And when Mayers was finally lifted, freshman Mavrick Rizy, who had his best outing of the season in closing out a 7-0 shutout of Little Rock on Friday night, imploded for a 10-4 final score.

When it was done, LSU’s pitching staff had walked 11 Little Rock batters, eight of whom came around to score. And as bad as that was they’d left 10 runners on base, including leaving the bases loaded in both the second and third innings.

And for the second time in this regional, Little Rock gave leadoff hitter Derek Curiel an intentional walk in order to get to LSU’s slumping RBI leader Jared Jones – and for the second time in this regional Jones couldn’t make them pay for the insult.

So many improbably bad things happened last night in producing that startling debacle that one is tempted to reach for a metaphysical explanation. Put another way, someone did something to infuriate the baseball gods.

Or Jobu, if you prefer.

What do you imagine that could have been?

It would have to be a hell of a karmic insult to draw down this level of disaster, wouldn’t you say?

Well, there was this, which landed on the LSU Athletic Department’s Facebook page before the game…

Not just the rainbow flag. Oh, no. The new one with the chevrons to include the pedophiles and others who make even the gay and lesbian alphabet people uncomfortable.

We’d show you the comments ratio’ing this horrid affront to the baseball gods (and lots of others) – there were oodles of them – but we can’t.

We can’t, you see, because whoever was responsible for posting that Pride Month homosupremacist political message on Facebook took it down not long after it went up.

And we wish we could identify the bigwig on the LSU food chain – LSU athletic director Scott Woodward, interim president Dr. Matt Lee, somebody on the Board of Supervisors, or maybe even Gov. Jeff Landry – who made a call telling the woke functionaries who thought they’d insult the people of Louisiana and the various interested sports deities by mixing radical-left politics on what should have been a joyous championship evening to knock it off.

All we can say is, we sure hope the retraction appeased the baseball gods such that LSU’s punishment lasted only one night.

Because another loss like Sunday’s would be a catastrophe that would turn college baseball’s most prestigious program into a laughingstock for a generation. And that’s no joke.