iTunes 12.7.4.80 skips to the next track

I use ITunes exclusively to listen to podcasts. Usually it works just fine, but every so often it will skip off one track to the next track in the playlist. If I doubleclick the first track, it will play for a few seconds and then skip to the next track again. I don't know what to do to get it to stay, other than putting it in its own playlist.

I've seen posts about older versions of iTunes complaining of the same thing, but rather than post there, I decided to make a new post to underline the fact that it's still a problem.

So, until this is fixed, does anyone know another/better workaround?

UPDATE: Even though I had definitely downloaded the first podcast before moving it into a playlist, when I went to try to move it to another playlist, I found that I couldn't. So I went back to the Unplayed list and right-clicked it and saw the option to download it. Once I did that, I tried listening to it in my playlist, and it didn't skip. So the question is, how did it become un-downloaded when I definitely did it before?