OMAHA, Neb. — Give this fair city credit.

When it decides to have a college baseball weather delay, it actually gets wet, with scattered lightning.

Monday night’s interruption of the LSU-UCLA game after three innings was the Tigers’ 19th game of the season to be delayed in some form or another.

Unlike many of the ones in Baton Rouge, you didn’t need sunscreen to wait it out.

It was real.

For that matter, the College World Series even has sense of humor about it, although probably unintended.

Monday night as the rain was steady-pouring and the lightning cracking, with players scrambling around and fans seeking cover, the big-screen message board at Charles Schwab Field flashed the following alert:

“Due to severe weather, tonight’s postgame kids’ running of the bases has been cancelled.”

The CWS is nothing if not family-friendly, but the added inconvenience didn’t seem high on LSU head coach Jay Johnson’s list of concerns.

His previous coaching stops before LSU were in San Diego, Reno and Tucson, none of them hot spots for storm chasers.

He’s now learning to deal with weather that doesn’t always follow Chamber of Commerce guidelines.

It was the fine print he didn’t check when he took the LSU job. Storms know their way around Omaha, too.

So he’s adjusting, and the overnight delay wasn’t much of a distraction.

The Tigers led 5-3 when the Monday night rains came and finished the job efficiently Tuesday morning to take a 9-5 victory over the Bruins.

It seemed inevitable. But with the delay, it wasn’t quite perfect.

Although the LSU fans showed up for the 10 a.m. resumption, their pregame timing was off.

“We’ll have to work on their alarm clocks,” Johnson said, “because the send-off from the (team) hotel was a little light at 7:45 a.m. this morning. They’re night people.”

A minor issue, perhaps. Johnson will forgive them.

But the delay could put a crimp in Johnson’s carefully planned pitching blue print.

LSU starter Anthony Eyanson was cruising after a rough first inning Monday, but with the delay not only would he be unable to join the join the kiddies for postgame base-running festivities, he obviously couldn’t join his teammates and pitch when the game resumed Tuesday.

Instead, Johnson had to use freshman Casan Evans, probably sooner in the CWS than the master plan called for.

It had to annoy Johnson, if for no other reason than it looked to be going so perfectly with Eyanson en route to a deep outing.

Johnson couldn’t let on, had to put on an all-is-well poker face as the steady rain made a next-day finish obvious.

“If I had the power to push back lightning I probably wouldn’t be a college baseball coach,” he said. “But I want to set a good example for the team. If I’m frustrated, making it a thing, then they’re going to make it a thing. It’s my job to not to make it a thing.”

Actually, now that LSU got away with having to pull Eyanson after just 44 pitches, it might not be the worst thing in the world.

It always seems to become a story line in the CWS, the dilemma of winning the game at hand but juggling that with what arms you might burn for the next game and the next.

Eyanson probably can’t pitch tonight, obviously, nor Evans or Saturday starter Kade Anderson.

But Eyanson might be available sooner than if he’d gone a full game. For instance, if the Tigers were to lose Wednesday, they might be able to bring him back to start what would be a must-win game Thursday.

Johnson never announces who his starter is going to be, but he had an excuse at Tuesday’s post game press conference since he didn’t know the opponent will until  UCLA and Arkansas played.

But he’s finally in the position he’s always wanted to be — 2-0 in the CWS and needing only one more win, with two chances to get it, to reach the championship round.

He was quick with the reminder that he’s been to the CWS championship round twice, once with Arizona and two years ago when LSU won it all, and both times he was on the other end of this inviting position where the Tigers now sit.

He beat a team twice to get there both times, so he knows it’s no guarantee.

Eyanson or not, LSU won’t have any excuses. The Tigers have plenty of arms to get one more victory.

It sets up pretty well.

“You win the first two games with only three guys unavailable for the next game, you’ve done a pretty good job,” Johnson said. “That’s probably where we’re at.”

Still, I’m guessing that, after beating UCLA Tuesday morning, they spent Tuesday night pulling for the Bruins.

That didn’t go according to plan either.