Lots of college baseball coaches are walking around this week not knowing what to do.

Same with softball coaches, whose seasons are over.

If you see one — he or she will look disheveled, pale and lost — just nod and keep moving. Nothing you say will help.

If they seem in a trance, it’s only because they are.

Six Louisiana schools this spring made an NCAA Baseball Regional: Grambling, Louisiana Tech, Louisiana-Lafayette, LSU, Nicholls and Tulane. SIX! That’s nearly a tenth of the 64-team field that’s now down to 16 for this weekend’s Super Regionals.

But as good as Louisiana college baseball was this spring, it’s now over. And not a one of the coaches of those six teams is feeling comfortable right now.

Not because they lost. I mean, they aren’t happy about losing, but you could make a case that each exceeded or at least matched reasonable expectations.

Those coaches are in the hinterlands because life has been scripted for them since January.

Meet as a staff. Scout. Practice. Weights. Eat. Bus ride. Catch breath …

Hotel check in. Hotel check out. Make out a lineup. In-and-out. Sixth inning and then the seventh inning and on like that. Post-game interview.

Shower. Collapse into bed. Tossing followed by its bastard cousin, Turning. Get out of bed and walk around and worry. Try to go back to sleep.

Another day. And another game. And then …

… suddenly …

NOT another game. Not until February.

There will be plenty to do between now and then. Keeping up with your guys in summer leagues. Maybe it’s the year you get a new set of uniforms, so design and order those. Offseason stuff for the guys returning. Downtime in December.

Then start it all over again.

But right now is an emptiness. A compass with no needle, a clock with no hands, a calendar with no days. Just boxes to somehow fill in until you get your footing again.

The LSU team gathered in the outfield in Chapel Hill after the heartbreaking loss to North Carolina Monday night in that regional’s final, the last time that particular group will be together in uniform. They flew back to Baton Rouge Tuesday and then … they’re out of games. Still a team, forever, but with no more games. The closest they’ll ever get to this again is a reunion.

Same thing played out in Ruston and New Orleans and Grambling, in Lafayette and in Thibodaux. Each team is its own little organism, its own little life, whether it’s Little League or Geezer League or high school or a team that makes an NCAA Regional. Some are good and some are bad but each has its own little life and there’s a melancholy when it ends unless you win The Last Game, and not many players get to win The Last BIG Game.

So something will always be left undone.

And as those players find their lives outside of the game — some, God help them and love them for it, will be coaches — left behind is their little coach, still in the locker room, some lockers now cleaned out, and he notices those and remembers, and sees the lockers of the guys coming back, and wonders who will fill the ones left blank — and then quietly out of nowhere he imagines the promise in those new lockers and the potential in those old ones, and then he kind of sees it all, starts sensing it, and then it’s time to move again, to grab a pencil and start writing, start planning, shake the cobwebs off and snap out of it because … it’s next season. It’s time to start.

BUT … we’ll give coaches the next two weeks to remain petrified, not as in scared but as in life-turned-to-stone. You have everyone’s permission to stay in a trance for the next two weeks and watch The Price is Right and maybe some of the Super Regionals, and stare at nothing; those closest to you understand.

(OF course, no one else does, or possibly could. See you in a couple weeks.)

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu