A few hours of downtime in the air helped Brittany Hitchcock regain her perspective.

Cal State Northridge launched three late-inning home runs in a comeback win against Hitchcock on April 7. The University of Hawaii right-hander used the flight back to Honolulu to craft a response to her first loss in nearly a month.

“Always on a road trip home you have a lot of time to do mental reflection,” Hitchcock said. “I think what I tried to do was let go of that outcome at Northridge and just reset and trust that I had been doing well at home and using that as fuel to get my confidence back and go out there and just pitch my game.”

Back in the circle at Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium last weekend, Hitchcock returned to form in firing two shutouts against UC Riverside to earn Big West pitcher of the week honors on Monday.

By Wednesday, the Rainbow Wahine were back on a flight to California for a pivotal conference series at second-place Cal State Fullerton.

The three-game series begins with a single game today at the Titans’ Anderson Family Field at 3 p.m. UH (25-15, 4-5 Big West) and Cal State Fullerton (23-19, 6-3) close the weekend with a doubleheader on Saturday.

Although the Rainbow Wahine are back on the road, the trip to Fullerton, Calif., will bring Hitchcock about 15 minutes from her home in Huntington Beach.

She attended games at Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State with her youth teams, her father’s best friend was an assistant with the Titans baseball program and she toured the Fullerton campus during the recruiting process.

But when the time to commit came around, “I found that Hawaii offered everything that I wanted,” Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock enters the series at 16-7 and lowered her earned-run average to 1.73 overall and 1.06 in Big West play with last week’s shutouts.

She allowed seven hits, struck out 11 and walked none in her 14 innings in the circle against UC Riverside to help the Wahine pull out a series win that kept them three games behind leader Long Beach State (7-2) with 12 left in the regular season.

“We’ll discuss the urgency to everything and the focus … because we’ve got 12 games left, that’s it, to make or break our season,” UH coach Bob Coolen said.

Hitchcock’s is tied for eighth in the country with eight shutouts, matching her combined total of the past two years. She’s already surpassed her strikeout total of last season with 133 in 1491⁄3 innings while walking just 21.

Coolen said Hitchcock maintains her conditioning in the weight room to handle two starts in a three-game series and noted some extra preparation for the UC Riverside series.

“She started the week on Monday and knew she had to get out there. It was our day to lift and hit and pitchers aren’t required to do anything but extra cardio and she went out to throw,” he said.

Coolen said she repeated the routine this week in advance of facing a Cal State Fullerton lineup led by senior Delynn Rippy, the Big West’s third-leading hitter at .361.