The two local entities with bowl lives this winter, FIU and the Orange Bowl, could’ve shared pom-poms Thursday and Saturday. In the end, both wound up happy.

FIU got what it wanted, and the Orange Bowl didn’t get what no BCS bowl would want.

The chips — and Big East teams — fell so that 8-4 FIU will make its second bowl appearance in a row at the Beef O’Brady’s St. Petersburg Bowl on Dec. 20. The opponent could be Pittsburgh, SMU or Tulsa, all teams from the two conferences, the Big East and Conference USA, committed to the bowl.

“These last couple of seasons have been an historic run for us,” FIU coach Mario Cristobal said. “The opportunity to continue to play into December, in our home state … is an honor and a privilege.

“It’s also extremely nice, I have to say, to go into another home [Saturday night] — this is the contact period for recruiting — and immediately start talking about the bowl opportunity we’ve engaged in.”

Meanwhile, the Discover Orange Bowl doesn’t have to worry about hosting a Louisville team with a dowdy (for a BCS game) 7-5 record that includes a loss to Marshall and a home spanking by FIU. Instead, expect West Virginia to join the ACC champion in the Jan. 4 game at Sun Life Stadium.

And the BCS will get what everyone expected for its championship game. Once LSU pulled away from Georgia 42-10 in Saturday’s SEC championship game, it only solidified an LSU-Alabama rematch in the BCS Championship.

FIU fans jumped on the Beef O’Brady’s St. Petersburg Bowl bandwagon over the past week, flooding the bowl’s Twitter and Facebook sites with pleas, promises and arguments for the bowl taking the Panthers. FIU athletic director Pete Garcia has been doing that since October.

Back then, FIU remained one of the favorites for the Sun Belt title. The Sun Belt has bowl affiliations with the New Orleans Bowl and the GoDaddy.com Bowl, although neither is required to take the conference champion. In fact, this year, the New Orleans Bowl took Louisiana-Lafayette, while the latter game took Sun Belt champion Arkansas State.

Still, it’s not hard to see why Garcia would begin romancing the Beef O’Brady’s folks. The game is a three-to-four-hour drive for the vast majority of FIU’s 46,000 students, who would be on holiday break and could still spend Christmas and New Year’s at home (the game will be played on the first night of Hanukkah); there is the lower costs for FIU’s traveling party; and a spot in a game owned by ESPN Regional Television, which guarantees broad-based exposure across the ESPN empire.

So when Garcia said, “This is the bowl we’ve always wanted,” he wasn’t just giving post-bowl bid puffery. All Garcia’s cozying and cuddling couldn’t change that the Beef O’Brady’s Bowl was betrothed to the Big East and Conference USA. Only five C-USA teams attained bowl eligibility for its six bowl commitments. But when the bowl acknowledged heavily posting FIU fans on its Facebook page, it addressed only the Big East side, saying FIU needed losses by South Florida, Connecticut and Pitt.

Speaking of the Big East, the winner often winds up in the Orange Bowl as the at-large team. Before Thursday, Louisville clinched a share of the Big East title. Thursday, a spectacular 26-yard, fourth-down completion between Miramar High graduates Geno Smith and Stedman Bailey set up West Virginia’s walk-off, game-winning field goal in a 30-27 win against South Florida. For FIU, that kept South Florida from being bowl-eligible. For the Orange Bowl, that put West Virginia in a tie with Louisville.

Cincinnati built a 28-3 lead on UConn on Saturday afternoon and nursed it to a 35-27 final. For FIU, that took UConn out of any bowl talk and, though Pitt beat Syracuse, opened the Beef O’Brady’s Bowl slot. For the Orange Bowl, that created a three-way tie atop the Big East, so the conference’s BCS bowl bid would go to the team with the highest BCS ranking. West Virginia is the only Big East school with a BCS ranking.

It was a happy ending to a week that began with FIU assured of nothing.

“There are so many moving parts, to say things were changing by the day [this week] is an understatement,” Garcia said. “They were changing by the hour.”