If you’re a baseball fan, you might know that W.P. Kinsella wrote “Shoeless Joe,” on which the Academy Award-nominated movie “Field of Dreams” was based.

If you’re a W.P. Kinsella fan you might know that he also wrote “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy,” in which a baseball game lasted more than 2,000 innings. That might be enough extra frames to get even the most diehard traditionalist to agree with starting with a runner on base.

Baseball’s timelessness is its charm, and its curse.

There’s no running out the clock, because there is no clock. It is possible to rally from any deficit and win — you can be down to your last out, and even your last strike. But in basketball and football they often stop playing before the final few seconds tick away.

When we were kids playing in the park our only measure of time, other than outs and innings, was sunset.

The other side of that is, as much as we’d like to, as adults we can’t always budget our time for a quick couple of thousand innings.

We’ve got things to do and people to see. And Sunday, the N.C. State baseball team had a place to go — home.

So, when the Wolfpack and Hawaii’s Rainbows met at Les Murakami Stadium, it ended as one of those rare times when the clock helps decide the outcome of a baseball game.

By mutual agreement, no new inning was to start after 4 p.m., so the visitors could get to the airport in time.

This resulted with N.C. State ahead 10-8 and winning by decision after eight innings.

Of course the UH fans didn’t like it. As far as they knew, N.C. State hadn’t finished its job, and Hawaii still had three outs left to try to take the rubber game of the three-game set against the No. 13 team in the nation.

They weren’t aware of the predetermined deadline agreement, and they had reason to hope for a comeback win, like the night before, when UH rallied late to win 7-5.

This time, the ’Bows trailed 10-4 after five innings but closed the gap with two runs in the seventh and two more in the eighth. There was legitimate hope that UH could rally yet again. Plus, Itsuki Takemoto — who has yielded just two baserunners in four innings as a Rainbow — was ready to take the mound to start the ninth.

But it wasn’t to be, and the ’Bows enter tonight’s midweek game at Hilo with a 3-4 record.

People who want to accuse N.C. State of playing stall ball Sunday simply don’t understand baseball.

Was it to the Wolfpack’s benefit to make pitching changes in the eighth, because that means the reliever gets time to warm up, meaning the clock could run out on Hawaii?

Yes.

But multiple late-inning pitching changes are a part of baseball, especially when the score is close, especially in the final game of a college series when there’s no game Monday to save any arms for.

The fact that changing pitchers made the inning longer was a side benefit for the visitors.

If N.C. State coach Elliott Avent really wanted to play dirty he’d have made even more pitching changes, and a few more mound visits, too.

As UH coach Rich Hill said, a curfew situation can help or hurt either team.

The fans did have a right to be irritated, though, because they paid for nine innings and got eight, and their team might have won if it had gone nine — and, as the home team, UH had last say, and could have made an abbreviated game much less likely by starting at noon instead of 1 p.m.

Heck, start at 11 a.m. and make even more money off of lunchtime concessions.

I’m willing to bet that Hawaii was the only place in the world with winter baseball and winter football back-to-back. This could have been cross-promoted.

UH football coach Timmy Chang was a high school hurler, and a natural to throw out the first pitch. Then, before football started, Hill could’ve borrowed the mic from Billy V and thrown out the first chee-hoo.