UPDATE: I bumped up the Excerpt count to 35 from the default 30 and the shortcode is gone! 🙂
Note that before I did the above, I switched to WP 2016 (deactivated GP-P) and it was the same thing. So not sure if this is still something with WPSP, but in the meantime, it’s working for this site so I’ll mark this Resolved 🙂