The Road to Omaha just got a lot tougher for LSU.

Head coach Jay Johnson didn’t rule it out — he said that “Some of the best wins I’ve had, including last year in Omaha (when the Tigers won the national championship) came after winning elimination games.”

But that’s what LSU faces now after North Carolina’s Vance Honeycutt had four RBIs on two  towering home runs and the host Tar Heels beat LSU 6-2.

North Carolina (44-13), the No. 4 national seed, is now one win away from the regional championship.

The Tigers (41-22) will have to win three more games, beginning at 11 a.m. Sunday with a rematch against Wofford, which stayed alive earlier Saturday with a 5-2 win over Long Island University.

The winner of that game will have to come back at 5 p.m. and beat North Carolina to force yet another game, winner-take-all, on Monday.

LSU beat Wofford Friday, 4-3, on Steven Milam’s walk-off solo homer to lead off the bottom of the ninth.

The Tigers will have to win the three games over the next two days after having burned their top two starters, Gage Jump and Luke Holman.

“For having three games to play, outside of having those two pitchers available we’re in about as good of a spot as we could be coming out of two games.” Johnson said. “We worked too hard to get here to let a little disappointment get in the way.

“I have complete confidence in our team and their ability to respond. I’ve never been so excited to have the chance to play a doubleheader as I am about tomorrow.”

LSU got another strong performance out of Holman — 11 strike outs, one walk in 6.2 innings —but Honeycutt hit a three-run homer off of him in the fifth and chased him in the seventh on an 0-2 pitch with two outs.

Meanwhile, the Tigers won the battles while losing the war against UNC starter Shea Sprague.

The plan, Johnson said, was to be patient and  run up Sprague’s pitch count — and  “He was out of the game by the fifth inning.

“I didn’t think we did a poor job, really, and we still couldn’t get to him.

“I thought we had a really good plan. He just didn’t give us much to do anything with — and when we did hit it hard, we hit it right at somebody.”

The Tigers certainly had their chances, but didn’t have much better luck against relievers Ben Peterson and Dalton Pence either.

They got runners to second in five of the first seven innings, but  were 1 for 7 with two outs and 1 for 6 with runners in scoring position.

LSU stranded nine base runners and hit into three double plays, including a highly controversial call that ended the second inning for the Tigers when Alex Milazzo was called for interference at second place.

With the call, Jake Brown was ruled out at first and instead of runners at the corners with two outs, it ended the inning.

“The call on the double play really hurt,” Johnson said. “You still have to get a two-out hit, but it would have put some stress on (Sprague) in the second.

“I didn’t think it should have been called interference but it was. We lost an opportunity there.”

More costly, perhaps, was the seventh, when the Tigers scored both their runs to cut the margin to 3-2, but could have come away with more.

They loaded the bases without incident with only one out, but got only two runs — on back-to-back walks — before Hayden Travinski hit into a double play the end the threat.

“Credit Pence,” Johnson said of the UNC reliever. “He made three really good pitches in a row the Travinksi – really difficult pitches to do anything with other than hit a ground ball.

“That’s was probably the one. If we can cash in right there, I definitely believe the end of the game might be different.

“We’re looking forward to trying to play them again Sunday night.”

There’s even more incentive the Tigers to trudge through the regional minefield.

If LSU somehow comes back to win the regional, the super regional would likely be in Baton Rouge.

Arizona, the host of the Tucson regional that Chapel Hill is paired against, went two-and-out in its home ball park and obviously can’t host a super regional.