OMAHA, Neb. — This would have been the year 2000, in the press conference immediately after LSU beat Florida State 6-3 to advance to the national championship game.

It was a heartbreaking loss for the Seminoles.

FSU’s folksy coach Mike Martin was at the podium, and his opening postgame statement caught me a little off guard.

He was emphatic in declaring that he had the best job in the world, he was happy as he could be, he would always love Florida State and its players and on and on and on.

I’d heard that kind of talk before, though I hadn’t been around Martin that much.

So as the thankful-for-this and thankful-for-that speech continued unabated, I side-whispered to a Florida-based scribe who was sitting next to me:

“I think he’s about to announce his retirement.” 

The guy chuckled at my naïvety.

“Nah,” he said, brushing me off. “We hear this every year when they get eliminated.”

The Seminoles generally do — check that, they always do get eliminated from Omaha.

This is FSU’s 22nd trip and there’s nary a trophy back in the case in Tallahassee.

This is Martin’s 16th trip, and the previous 15 were just as fruitless as 2000.

It defies the law of averages.

Martin is college baseball’s version of the dreaded “best golfer never to win a major.”

He’s won everything else — he has all 24 of FSU’s 50-win seasons, he’s the second winningest coach in college history with the highest winning percentage in college history.

But never the big one.

For reference, by the time Skip Bertman had taken LSU to Omaha 15 times — no, wait, Bertman only went 11 times, and won the blasted thing five times.

For further reference, he’s been at FSU since 1980, four years before Bertman took over at LSU.

It’s a shame, really.

Martin truly is one of the nicest, most genuine people in all of sports, and surely the most habitually optimistic. He can also be one of the funniest (think Jerry Clower, with just a shade of the rough edges honed off).

For instance, LSU’s Paul Mainieri was waxing poetic at Friday’s joint press conference, noting that the four teams in the Tigers’ blue blood bracket had combined for 12 national championships.

Martin spoke next.

“I noticed you didn’t say anything about our national championships,” he said with a wry, but playful, look at Mainieri.

No, this isn’t a plea for anybody in Louisiana to change allegiances.

You do what you’ve got to do.

Just know that Mainieri, a fine enough fellow himself, might be the unwilling villain in today’s second game of the CWS.

Or maybe not.

Some of it has faded a bit now, but back in the LSU heyday, Florida State was the anti-LSU.

The good Omaha people hated Florida State — well, strongly didn’t like, or didn’t care for, at least — as much as they loved their adopted Tigers.

It went against every grain in their polite body, but Omaha people often booed the Seminoles with reckless abandon.

Most of it had to do with the fact that Florida State at the time tended to end a lot of Nebraska Cornhusker football dreams.

Some of Martin’s best postgame routines, in fact, marveled at how such nice people could dislike his fine young men so much, and he even tried to remind them (good-natured jokingly, of course) that he had nothing to do with whatever atrocities happened in the previous January’s Orange Bowl.

This will be the first time Mainieri, a longtime fan, has played Martin — with LSU at least.

But he’s been responsible for some of Martin’s pain.

OK, not pain, exactly. Hate to belabor the point, but as long as Martin wakes up the every day, it will be with a smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye and probably a self-deprecating explanation to the night before.

When Mainieri was at Notre Dame, the Irish was an unexpected regional winner in 2002. It was thought the Irish would be done for when shipped to Tallahassee for the super regional.

It might have been Martin’s best team — 59-12 at the time.

Of course, Notre Dame won two of three and the Seminoles finished 60-14.

For reference, the series is remebered at Florida State the way LSU fans recall getting Stony Brook-ed.

The cool thing is that, according to Mainieri, Martin can still pick at Mainieri about one of Martin’s darkest hours.

So what’s not to like?

“I hope he wins a national championship as much as anybody,” Mainieri said Friday. “Just not this year.”