Good Lord, don’t tease them. Haven’t these kids been through enough already?

“I was def­i­nite­ly dis­ap­point­ed,” Joey Trec­cia, a senior guard on the Pon­derosa offen­sive line, told me Wednes­day, not long after his fall foot­ball dreams went kablooey after about 25 hours of false hope.

Trec­cia is a 6‑foot‑3, 270-pound road-grad­er. He’s already got three offers, all from Divi­sion II schools. He’s come leaps and bounds from the stuff that’s on his junior game tape.

Alas, junior game tape is all he’s got.

“I was most­ly sur­prised, just because of every­thing on Twit­ter, social media, with oth­er states hav­ing reversed their rules to start in the fall,” Trec­cia con­tin­ued. “I was sur­prised and then kind of dis­ap­point­ed that things turned out the way they did.”

Wel­come to the club, man.

Tues­day: Hey, Bron­cos fans can come back at Mile High! Gov. Jared Polis is cool with foot­ball in the fall! Every­body dance!

Wednes­day: Hey, Von Miller’s prob­a­bly out for the year! CHSAA says we’re still hold­ing off ‘til spring!

Has there ever been a 24-hour stretch with that much emo­tion­al whiplash? What the heck did Michi­gan, which just reversed course on fall foot­ball, fig­ure out that we sud­den­ly couldn’t?

“In order for 1A to 5A to be con­duct­ed, we have to have an exten­sion and an excep­tion on the num­ber of play­ers that can be on the field,” CHSAA com­mis­sion­er Rhon­da Blan­ford-Green explained Wednes­day night. “And I don’t want this to be all about foot­ball — those excep­tions have to hap­pen for wrestling and they have to hap­pen for swim­ming, too.

“And we don’t have those excep­tions yet.”

Wait. What?

“It’s more about hav­ing enough peo­ple on the side­lines to be able to have your offense, your defense, and to be able to tran­si­tion those kids into the game safely.”

Right. Got that part.

Then why did the Guv say what he said?

“I think his heart was in the right place,” Blan­ford-Green said. “I think that’s what the Gov­er­nor desires, to make some­thing hap­pen. But there are a lot of dif­fer­ent fac­tors that always play into it.”

Know this: CHSAA didn’t keep foot­ball in the spring as part of a vast con­spir­a­cy to some­how spite your favorite can­di­date. Or to tac­it­ly endorse another.

Hey, lib­er­als go to Bron­cos games, too. Lots of ‘em.

“I have, right now, three foot­ball sta­di­ums that pulled up their turf already because they were going by the (new) cal­en­dar,” Blan­ford-Green said. “They wouldn’t have had a facil­i­ty to play in.”

On the flip side, Pon­derosa foot­ball coach Jaron Cohen says he’d have a fleet of about three-dozen cars ready to shut­tle his play­ers to a game at a moment’s notice. Any­where. Anytime.

“I still have a hard time rec­on­cil­ing that I’m coach­ing my kid, that youth foot­ball is going, and high school foot­ball is not,” Cohen said. “It almost feels like we’re on Bizarro World.”

It’s a world that’s devolved into one long MMA card, gov­erned by the bina­ry rules of sports bar debates. My guy vs. your guy. If you’re not for us, you’re against us. There’s only black and white, right and wrong, evil and good.

One side screams that a mask is to the blue team what a MAGA hat is for the red. (It isn’t.) The virus is overblown. The virus is under­blown. My sci­ence is bet­ter than your science.

The kids just want to play football.

They don’t want to be pawns in the polit­i­cal version.

“Did (CHSAA) look at oth­er states and how they made their deci­sions?” asked Mark McAl­lis­ter, whose son, Luke, is a senior quar­ter­back at Palmer Ridge and a CSU com­mit­ment. “The gov­er­nor, he’s smil­ing in a news con­fer­ence, (and I thought), ‘This is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty, this is a good news sto­ry.’ And nobody could’ve even imag­ined that they would just imme­di­ate­ly yank it away from them and say, ‘No, just kid­ding.’ It’s deflat­ing, really.”

Mark and his wife, Helen, have been try­ing to ral­ly folks to their cause, launch­ing the web site LetCoPlay.com last week and a cor­re­spond­ing Twit­ter account that picked up 543 fol­low­ers in about six days. They’ve orga­nized let-them-play ral­lies in three spots — High­lands Ranch, Delta and Col­orado Springs — to run con­cur­rent­ly Fri­day at 3:30 p.m.

“It’s def­i­nite­ly a dark day for Col­orado foot­ball,” Cohen said. “But after (Wednes­day), I’m going to stop being (upset) about it and focus on get­ting my boys ready for March. What else can I do?”

They’ve been through enough. We all have.

The kids, especially.

“It’s def­i­nite­ly kind of a punch in the gut,” Trec­cia said. “But I def­i­nite­ly don’t feel betrayed. I just think, it hap­pens. It sucks, but you’ve just kind of got to get through it. And with where we’re liv­ing today, you can nev­er be 100 per­cent sure.”

Refresh­ing take. Espe­cial­ly at a time when all the adults around them can’t stop fum­bling the dang ball.