Maxx Tissenbaum is returning to Baton Rouge.

The former Stony Brook second baseman bought his plane ticket Wednesday morning, along with a handful of teammates from the "Shock the World" Seawolves of 2012.

Surely you remember Stony Brook. It's the small state university on Long Island that vanquished heavily favored LSU in a historic upset in the NCAA super regional, which sent the young Division I program to its first College World Series.

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The rematch is at 6 p.m. Friday, when No. 1-seeded LSU plays No. 4 Stony Brook on the first day of the NCAA Baton Rouge regional at Alex Box Stadium, the college baseball cathedral that hosted the underdog story few have forgotten.

Tissenbaum, now six months into his job as a service contractor for an information security company, was refreshing his Twitter feed on a beach near the Long Island Sound on Monday, when the NCAA selection committee announced Stony Brook would be going back to Baton Rouge.

He called his father. His sister. His grandfather.

They had all been at the 2012 super regional, and they agreed it would be a "no brainer" for Tissenbaum to return to Louisiana, where a part of him has never really left.

"It's something that I will absolutely never forget," Tissenbaum said. "It was truly the best month of baseball that I ever experienced."

Meanwhile, the group chat between the former Seawolves still living in Long Island buzzed to life.

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Frankie Vanderka, the winning pitcher of that series-clinching Game 3, became the ringleader trying to get his former teammates, all now in their late 20s, to fly down for the regional.

Vanderka called former first baseman Kevin Courtney, who made the iconic diving catch into the stands in Game 1, who left the New York Police Department six months ago and moved to Los Angeles but still gets 6 a.m. calls from Vanderka because he keeps forgetting the time difference.

Vanderka's texts reached Anthony Italiano, the reserve catcher who is immortalized in the famous photographs of Stony Brook's dogpile. Italiano still wears his College World Series ring inside his Long Island office, where he is now a financial advisor, likely a decade away from his former teammates bugging him for savings tips.

Italiano can't go. Bachelor's party. Courtney can't, either.

By Friday, Vanderka may wrangle a few more teammates before he departs Levittown, New York, where he works for a surveying and engineering company and coaches the ninth-grade baseball team at his alma mater, MacArthur High.

"Everyone here is asking about (that season)," Vanderka said. "That's the mountaintop for me. At a stadium like that? Fans surrounding you like that? That's something you tell your kids about."

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'Everything you dreamed'

As a coach, Vanderka has adopted the numbers grid, a brainteaser worksheet that he once had to fill out as a pitcher under former Stony Brook pitching coach Mike Marron.

The worksheet has three boxes, filled with numbers 1 to 100 that are shuffled within each box. Outside each box are numbers from 1 to 5,000. From far away, the whole worksheet looks like one big jumble of numbers.

It's a concentration exercise. The Stony Brook pitchers would get three minutes to circle the numbers in order within each box.

To get to 30 is pretty good.

"It teaches you to go one thing at a time without looking at everything around you," Vanderka said. "So when something hits the fan, you're still good."

Who knows just how much that grid exercise helped on June 8, 2012, when Stony Brook arrived at Alex Box Stadium to play before greater numbers than they'd ever seen.

Tissenbaum remembers describing to a disbelieving LSU fan Stony Brook's Joe Nathan Field — a thousand-seat facility bordered by neighborhoods and a shallow wood.

"It's not our stadium; it's our field," Tissenbaum told the LSU fan. "It has bleachers, and there'll be 60 people if the women's soccer team comes."

As the Stony Brook bus chugged up Highland Road, Alex Box emerged like a colossus.

"It was everything you dreamed of how it would be being in the major leagues," Courtney said.

And the fans — yes, those rowdy LSU fans. The Seawolves experienced their unyielding force before the series even began.

"There was a website called TigerDroppings, where fans trash teams coming in," Italiano said. "We were on the bus laughing hysterically. They would take our pictures and put our lookalikes next to them. One of them, the exact words were: 'This is ridiculous. One of their catchers is Anthony Italiano.' And it was just a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs."

That Friday night, more than 10,000 people packed their way into the stadium for Game 1. More people, Tissenbaum said, than they had played in front of their entire careers at Stony Brook.

"I said to so many people, 'Until I play in a Major League World Series, there wouldn't be a way to top that atmosphere,’ ” said Tissenbaum, who played eight seasons of minor league and Independent League baseball. "You could almost feel the crowd with the 'Geaux Tigers' from first to third, swaying back and forth."

Italiano added: "I remember being in the third base dugout. The floor of the stadium is aluminum, and they were stomping their feet. Coach is trying to yell 'Willy!' Ten feet away, (third baseman William Carmona) can't hear him. The whole team had to yell to get his attention."

And in the stands, Italiano said, fans had found old pictures of the players from their Facebook profiles and had put them on boards. They'd found old statuses from way back and were shouting them at the players.

Such was the stage for Game 1, a back-and-forth 5-4 LSU win that took 12 innings and two days to complete.

Said Italiano: "That first game may have been one of the best ever played."

It's official! LSU baseball will host NCAA regional at Alex Box Stadium this weekend For the seventh time in eight years, LSU baseball's pursuit of an NCAA championship will begin at Alex Box Stadium.

'Did that really happen?'

The Thursday before Game 1, the Stony Brook baseball team took a stroll around Alex Box Stadium after batting practice.

Once they reached the first base line, then-assistant coach Joe Pennucci walked to where the baseline wall came to a corner.

"He points to this spot and he goes, 'I bet you wouldn't dive into this spot to make a catch,’ ” Courtney said.

Nearly 24 hours later, leading 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth, Courtney found himself chasing a foul ball in that exact spot. As the ball fell, Courtney felt the wall, and he dove into the stands to make the catch — a play that he and his roommate, Vanderka, would see make the No. 1 play on "SportsCenter" later in their hotel room.

Courtney returned to the dugout. He and Pennucci just stared at each other.

Did that really happen?

Fate wasn't finished.

LSU second baseman JaCoby Jones tied the game with a home run in the bottom of the ninth, and each time Stony Brook regained a one-run lead in the 10th and the 11th, LSU answered with another home run.

"You're like, 'Damn, when is this going to stop?’ ” Courtney said.

Rain halted the game, a delay that lasted until 10 a.m. the following day.

Then LSU's All-American right-hander, Kevin Gausman, stopped the game for good, retiring three consecutive batters in one relief inning, paving the way for a walk-off single by Mason Katz in the 12th.

"(Gausman) was the best pitcher we saw all year," Courtney said. "(When) he came in as relief, he did a crow hop from the back of the mound and did 104 mph. We just looked at each other."

Gausman, picked No. 4 overall by the Baltimore Orioles in the 2012 MLB draft, was scheduled to start Game 2, and he had just gotten warmed up.

"Knowing that we had to beat him to get to Game 3," Tissenbaum said. "That was a huge task."

But Stony Brook had proven that Cinderella filled larger shoes than most people thought.

There was a reason the Seawolves had gone 46-11 in the regular season, 21-3 in the America East Conference, and that seven of its players were selected in the 2012 MLB draft — including centerfielder Travis Jankowski, who became the program's highest draft pick by going No. 44 overall to the San Diego Padres.

And when Courtney knocked a solo home run to right field off Gausman in the fifth inning, that gave Stony Brook its final run in a 3-1 win to force Game 3.

"It was OK; we can do this," Tissenbaum said. "We can go right up, toe-to-toe with that guy."

Paired with his Game 1 dive, Courtney said he "had the series of my life" that weekend against LSU, when he went 5 for 13 (.385) with an RBI.

Did it matter that his best games came against a guy like Gausman?

"Oh God, yes," Courtney said. "I used to draft him in every fantasy draft, every two years after he came up. My friends would just laugh at me."

Game 3 was pushed back to a 7:05 p.m. start on Sunday because of a weather delay, and Vanderka was scheduled to start.

He remembers it was a week before Father's Day, and he ate lunch with his father in the hotel lobby.

"He looked up and said, 'You nervous?’ ” Vanderka said. "I said, 'I don't even know at this point.’ ”

Vanderka and catcher Pat Cantwell devised a game plan: pick up the pace. Put down the signs. Give him the ball. Throw. Focus like the grid brainteaser had taught.

Eight innings passed. Stony Brook led 7-2, and Vanderka had a two-hitter going with one batter standing in the way of Omaha.

On a 1-2 count, Vanderka shook off Cantwell to throw a slider — the only time Vanderka believes he ever shook him off.

"I saw the ball go past him," Vanderka said. "Silent. Slows down. I remember Pat grabbing me. Everyone looked like we were a football team coming out of the dugout."

Tissenbaum said he has no memory of the celebration. He blacked out after the pitch, regaining consciousness 20 minutes later in the dugout, talking to his mother and grandmother on the phone.

Oh my God. We did it.

Today, he'll point to the replay of the dogpile. Players are running. Jumping. Then, Tissenbaum staggers into the frame like a dehydrated man from the desert and collapses on the nearest edge of the pile.

"It was an out-of-body experience," Tissenbaum said. "There really wasn't a time in the series to relax physically, mentally. ... I don't think my brain processed it big enough."

But it was true.

And after the dogpile cleared, Italiano remembers, one of the LSU fans waved the team over, and the Seawolves did a victory lap, high-fiving everyone in the stadium.

"It's something I will take with me forever," Italiano said.

'It's baseball'

On a Tuesday night, Tissenbaum takes a call in his living room.

He's with his girlfriend and the TV show "Shark Tank" is in the background. Tissenbaum says his girlfriend has gotten a little irritated with how much he's been talking about that 2012 season in the past few days.

But this is baseball. That used to be life.

A Toronto native, he's seen the increased scouting attention northerners have been getting since Stony Brook's fabled run to the College World Series, which ended swiftly in two consecutive losses.

Courtney still gets asked about his famous catch, although he said Vanderka won't let anyone forget it.

Most of their baseball careers ended in the minors, although Cantwell is in Class AAA with the Toronto Blue Jays and Jankowski is in his fifth big league season with the Padres.

Memories still come easily.

Tissenbaum attended an Atlanta Braves game recently, and he looked down at the mound and watched Gausman toe the rubber as Atlanta's starter.

"That's the guy we beat at LSU," Tissenbaum said.

The biggest assembly of "Shock the World" Seawolves were last together when Tyler Johnson, the winning pitcher in Game 2, was inducted into the Stony Brook Hall of Fame in October.

And as the reunion continues Friday in Baton Rouge, will there still be a little magic left?

"You never know what's going to happen," Vanderka said. "It's baseball."

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