SUPER REGIONAL NOTEBOOK:

BATON ROUGE, La. — The shelf life of a baseball team, especially college baseball, can be cruelly concise.

Such is the case for the UC Irvine Anteaters, who took the better part of four months to come together, then get hot, only to run into a team even hotter with enough home-town magic to finally send the UCI road warriors home.

UCI had, in the words of first-year coach Mike Gillespie, been to and conquered the Taj Mahals of college baseball the last two seasons.

The Anteaters stunned many by earning the program’s first NCAA Division I regional title last season, topping host Texas at Dell Diamond in Round Rock, Texas.

A Super Regional sweep followed at Wichita State, before the Anteaters won two extra-inning games on their way to a third-place finish at the program’s first College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

This season, UCI (42-18) finished tied for third in the Big West Conference, but once again prevailed in a regional on the road, this time topping host Nebraska, as well as Oral Roberts (twice) to sweep three games last week at Haymarket Park in Lincoln.

But the task the ’Eaters faced at LSU, where Gillespie had seen two of his USC teams absorb postseason elimination, was, well, as advertised.

“We’re very comfortable in recognizing that we really played the hottest team in the country and a really, really good team,” Gillespie said. “We knew that coming here, and playing them here was going to be no picnic. So hats off [to the Tigers (47-17-1)] and we wish them well [at the College World Series].

“We tried to prepare our players for coming here, but I don’t think you can prepare anybody for this, until you get here. This — and I mean this in a complimentary way — is a very, very special place; a very unique place ... There are lots of places where there’s great baseball played and there’s great support and they get behind their teams. But there is nothing like this. This is in first place and everything else is a distant second place.”

This place was 70-year-old Alex Box Stadium, which drew a record crowd of 8,173 in its final hurrah.

Something else for which the UCI players were unprepared was the finality of the season being over.

“These last three years have been unbelievable, especially these last two,” said junior shortstop Ben Orloff, a recent major league draft pick who may or may not return. “The bond that you have with your teammates is huge. The thing we will remember most down through the years is what tight-knit groups we’ve had all three years. It’s just really hard that we know we’re not going to get to play with these guys ever again.”

Senior catcher Aaron Lowenstein is among the others who won’t be back, joining fourth-round draft pick Scott Gorgen, a junior All-American pitcher, seniors Josh Tavelli, Tom Calahan and Chris Lopez, and draftees Ollie Linton and Tony Asaro as possible losses.

“First, we’ll lose a few [seniors] and a few are impacted by the draft and we haven’t had the chance to sit down and talk to them as to what their plan is and what might happen,” Gillespie said. “Regardless, I think we have a real good nucleus of a good returning group, so we have every reason to be optimistic about this program continuing to be really a strong program.

“We’ll be better and we’ll keep getting better. We like our recruiting class and we have a pretty good jump on the following recruiting class.

“I’m really proud of the year we had, very, very proud, and I think justifiably proud,” Gillespie said. “It’s unfortunate this game being the last game, is one that is freshest in our mind. But I think in the days ahead, all of us will be able to have some objectivity and a read on just what the year was. And it was really an outstanding year.

“It was not easy at any time. As I’ve said many times, the scores would reflect that we really had to grind it out and we had to compete and battle and battle and battle. I think our team made a ton of progress. A lot of our guys that played really well at the end of the year were not the guys that were getting it done at the beginning of the year.”

 Gillespie said he and the players will remember being three outs away from Omaha, with a 7-4 lead and their sophomore All-American closer Eric Pettis on the mound Sunday, before LSU rallied for five runs and a 9-7 win.

“Don’t we wish we had a big, big storm that would have hit in the seventh inning [Sunday],” Gillespie said. “But I would not suggest that we had the life sucked out of us after [Sunday], I was very confident in the belief that our guys would come out and compete.”

Orloff said the final two losses are not what will be remembered about this season.

“We had a good year and we’re not going to let what happened the last two nights take away from our year,” Orloff said. “We’re proud of what we did.”

Added Lowenstein: “Winning last year in Texas, Wichita and this year in Nebraska, it doesn’t get much better than that. Those are some of the biggest powerhouses in college baseball.”

BARRY FAULKNER may be reached at (714) 966-4615 or at barry.faulkner@latimes.com.