Mississippi State pitcher Blake Smith simply stood and stared.

It was a look of frustration and anger, of sadness and jealousy, as Arizona’s players piled on top of one another on the edge of the right field grass at Dudy Noble Field.

Smith and his teammates wanted that to be them. It wasn’t. And they no longer had a say in the matter.

Mississippi State’s season ended Saturday with a 6-5 loss to Arizona in Game 2 of the Starkville Super Regional. The Bulldogs won 44 games this season, along with the Southeastern Conference regular-season championship and a regional on this same field a week earlier.

Back-to-back one-run losses in the super regional, however, made it just a very good season instead of the dream the Bulldogs desperately wanted it to be.

“They are champions,” Mississippi State coach John Cohen said. “They won the most difficult league, in my opinion. They won a regional. They achieved a lot, but they wanted to get to Omaha.”

The Bulldogs didn’t even make the SEC Tournament in 2015, but bounced back this year to win the league’s regular-season championship for the first time since 1989.

They swept the Starkville Regional, and the pitching staff allowed four runs in a span of 40 innings in the regional and super regional.

Things unraveled on several levels in the super regional, though. First, the bats went cold in a 1-0 loss in Game 1. The Bulldogs left 10 men on base and were shut out for the first time since the opening weekend of the season.

In Game 2, it was the pitching that finally cracked. The bullpen blew a 5-1 lead in the eighth inning. Arizona scored three runs on Ryan Aguilar’s home run in the eighth, the tying run in the ninth, then won it on Cesar Salazar’s walk-off RBI single in the 11th.

Arizona had 10 hits in the last four innings of Game 2. The bullpen will get the blame, but Cohen noted that at least some of it was Arizona getting the job done at the plate.

In the ninth inning, for example, Alfonso Rivas drove in the tying run with a single after fouling off several tough pitches. Rivas’ hit was a soft blooper that fell into left center field.

Smith, who was tagged with the loss, got out of a jam in the ninth inning and pitched a scoreless 10th before faltering in the 11th.

As a unit, Mississippi State’s five pitchers struck out 15 batters in the game.

“Blake was phenomenal. When you strike out a team that doesn’t strike out a whole lot, 15 times, you are making some guys swing and miss. We had a lot of really good pitching sequences,” Cohen said.

Now, as is often the case in college baseball, Cohen and his staff will have to assemble a team for 2017 capable of building on this year’s success — and it might not be easy.

Eleven players, as well as several signees, were selected in last week’s Major League Baseball draft. Among those was pitcher Dakota Hudson, who was a first-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals.

“A lot of guys in the locker room will have decisions to make,” Cohen said. “That is another reason why you come to Mississippi State, because you have a huge opportunity to move on and become a professional baseball player. I am excited for them as well.”

As for this year’s team, Cohen emphasized that he was proud of all it accomplished. Even though the Bulldogs didn’t make it to the CWS, they restored some luster to a program that took a hit with a sub.-.500 finish in 2015.

“I think this club has achieved a lot and has worked really hard,” Cohen said. “They can hold their heads up and know that they were a great Mississippi State baseball team. Looking at the tradition of our program, that is saying a lot.”