Podcast play in wrong order in iTunes 12.9 on the Mac

Been trying to sort an annoying issue when listening to podcast son my Mac. No matter what I have tried, I can’t seem to get my podcast to play in order from oldest to newest. I’ll be listening to an episode and once completed, there is a pause, then it begins playing the previous episode that was already marked as “played”. This issue surfaced when I updated to High Sierra and given I mostly listen to podcasts on my phone, it was not urgent enough to dig deep into it. Lately though, I am working on projects that have me at my Mac more , so it now has moved up the priority list.

I’ve searched out the issue to see if others were encountering this, but to date, have not found a solution. It occurs with all my podcasts so it’s not just one of them. Have deleted and re-subscribed with no luck. Ive also tried all kinds of “recipes” of sorting in the app and with settings, but no matter what I have changed , the issue still exist. I am currently running Mojave 10.14 and iTunes 12.9.0.164.