Whatever becomes of this LSU baseball season, the Tigers and their fandom surely will look back at March 5 and belly-laugh until their toenails hurt.

If LSU is as good as head coach Jay Johnson thinks the Tigers are, then all concerned will be able to chuckle in retrospect, recall it with something approaching whimsy.

It wasn’t very funny at the time, mind you. But sometimes baseball goes all baseball on you, especially when the better team, the team that should win, isn’t paying much attention.

Part of the game’s charm.

Besides, in the end, unless this is a misprint, LSU won the game, something like 11-9 over North Dakota State, a victory that at times looked more like a choppy, Bennie Hill TV skit than taking two and hitting to right.

Details are fuzzy. In an odd sort of way, it was still entertaining.

It’s also worth noting that the next night, order was restored to The Box as the Tigers invoked the mercry rule on the Bison in a 13-3 game shortened to seven innings.

Besides, probably no harm done. LSU had the good sense to slip this diamond farce in on Mardi Gras night, so perhaps many of the usual fans were not fully possessed of their faculties, nor facilities. Maybe a bit tipsy.

The game itself, now it was full-blown drunk.

LSU was one day into its latest reign as the No. 1 baseball team in the land, anointed by the national rankings just Monday.

Now North Dakota State, if you’ve heard of at all, it is for stacking up 10 of the last 14 FCS football national championships.

Baseball is another matter, a bit of a struggle for the Bison, as they brought a 1-9 record to Alex Box Stadium on an extended season-opening road trip, one that continues at Tulane this weekend and won’t check back to see if their Fargo home has suitably thawed out for baseball until March 28.

So what in infernal tarnation were a bunch of Buffaloes doing leading LSU 7-1 heading into the bottom of the third inning?

It’s complicated, also funny, with only brief and fleeting  outbreaks of honest baseball.

“We finally had kind of a clunker,” Johnson said afterwards. “I don’t think we played like that in our first 12 games.”

Well, that’s one way of putting it, although he was probably stretching things when he said he was “proud” of his team for the biggest comeback of the season.

And it wasn’t really that North Dakota State put a big scare in the Tigers. Maybe it got a tad squeamish, but it was more like amused bewilderment.

If the normally sure-handed Tigers weren’t making one of their three errors on the night, they were playing (wild) pitch and (no) catch on the mound.

One of the wild pitches allowed a batter to reach first despite striking out (he later scored of course).

You kept wondering … was that the punch line?

Not even close.

There were plenty of hijinks.

Maybe it all jumped the rails in the fourth inning when — on back-to-back pitches — a pair of  Bison baserunners scored, one on a wild pitch, the next a passed ball.

That put North Dakota State up 9-5 heading into the bottom of the fourth and, for sure, most of this goofiness was in the first four innings.

All told, it was three LSU errors, let’s see, four wild pitches, a passed ball, a ball, six walks, four hit batters, two baserunning blunders … everything, it seemed but that elusive baseball partridge in a pear tree.

But in a game featuring much comic relief (the fielding was often pretty funny, too) it was, finally, the bullpen that straightened up and shut the Bison out over the final five innings. It was a prelude to the six-run comeback, capped in the bottom of the eighth on Steven Milan’s two-run double.

There were more sighs of relief than curtain calls when that affair was over.

But maybe it was a reminder that LSU, which apparently doesn’t have much interest in bringing better non-conference competition to The Box, can’t afford to mail it in, no matter the competition.

It doesn’t look much different for the weekend when North Alabama, although the Lions look to have some decent starting pitching, comes calling with a 3-8 record.

But it’s the last tune-up weekend before Southeastern Conference play begins next week.

Johnson would rather see legitimate baseball from his Tigers rather than the sideshows the game can produce.