MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The college baseball landscape has long been dominated by the boys in the Sun Belt, with some West Coast success mixed in.

Big Ten teams and their snow-shortened seasons haven’t kept up.

Well, there’s at least one way those climate-constrained programs from the northern part of the country can make their springtime disadvantage temporarily disappear: Keep winning well into June, just like Minnesota has done.

The Gophers have reached the Super Regional round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time, in 20 years of the 64-team format. They start a best-of-three series at No. 3 overall seed Oregon State on Friday, needing two victories to make their first College World Series since 1977.

“We knew if we played far enough the weather would turn out like this every day,” said Gophers shortstop Terrin Vavra, standing on the sun-soaked artificial turf at Siebert Field under a blue sky painted precisely for being at the ballpark before practice on Tuesday afternoon.

John Anderson, in his 38th season as head coach at Minnesota, has been hard-pressed to come up with one that’s been more satisfying than this.

“It’s just a wonderful group that has taken on every challenge, whether it’s been a daily practice or getting in the weight room and conditioning, or dealing with the weather and finding a place to practice and prepare,” Anderson said on Sunday night after the 14th-seeded Gophers beat UCLA for the second straight time to win their regional. “They never flinched. They never quit preparing and working and pushing one another every single day.”

The Gophers (44-13) have won 12 straight games and 16 of their last 17. They endured some of the harshest April weather a Minnesotan could imagine, including a mid-month blizzard that dumped about 15 inches of snow on the Twin Cities area. Their home series against Penn State was moved to Purdue on April 6-8, and the final tally was six games canceled, two postponed and two suspended. Before the NCAA Tournament, the Gophers had only nine games on campus at Siebert Field. They played as scheduled 13 nonconference games at nearby U.S. Bank Stadium, starting three weeks it hosted the Super Bowl.

“Usually when you go through springs like that you see a little bit of inconsistency in performance,” said Anderson, who was a student assistant coach on the 1977 team whose playing career was cut short by injury. “But I never saw that.”