⏩ SPORTS: Jeff Jacobs: The hurt is real, the decision is right.

Trinity Catholic basketball coach Brian Kriftcher was getting ready to hop on a train for a meeting Tuesday when he got the email. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference had canceled the remainder of its winter sports state tournaments because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Boys basketball? Gone. Girls basketball? Gone. Boys hockey? Gone. Swimming? Gone. Girls hockey, which isn’t directly administered by the CIAC? Gone, too.

“I feel awful for the kids,” Kriftcher said. “Our kids have made supreme sacrifices, have worked their tails off, have so looked to this opportunity. To have it taken from them, whether it was a good decision or a bad decision is not for me to say, but I feel awful for them. Awful for the Trinity Catholic community, for coach (Mike) Walsh who devoted 40 years of his life to the place. This was supposed to be our swan song.”

There was anger around the state after CIAC executive director Glenn Lungarini explained that a collective decision had been made to put a stop to our state high school winter games. There will be no Run To The Sun. Not this March.

“This is the most over reactionary decision ever made,” Jason Shea, athletic director and basketball coach at No. 7 Notre Dame

West Haven tweeted. “Absolutely atrocious leadership. Just told first player and the reaction was devastation. How can playing with no fans be ‘dangerous’?”

Yes, there was anger and there was hurt and, as high school coaches expressed on social media, there were tears when players were told. For a young person to work so hard for a goal, to have forged personal bonds that will last a lifetime, to be so excited for an opportunity at a state championship, only to have it ripped away at the last minute by something unseen and hard to fully grasp?

It hurts. It hurts something bad.

The only thing worse would be to put those kids’ health at risk, or more specifically their parents, and most specifically the lives of their grandparents. So, yes, the CIAC made an appropriate decision. This is a volatile situation, with matters changing daily, and the tournaments are a huge logistical undertaking.

“It’s sad. It’s disappointing,” said UConn coach Dan Hurley, whose son Drew plays for No. 1 East Catholic. “I know Coach (Luke) Reilly, the amount they invest into that program in pursuit of an opportunity like that.

“I’ve had the opportunity to see a ton of Connecticut high school basketball the last couple of years, and it’s heartbreaking for all the coaches, all the players across the state. The pursuit of a championship is the value of sports. To be robbed of it because of an unfortunate situation with the coronavirus, it sucks. It sucks for my son. It sucks for all those kids and coaches.”

It may suck worst for Trinity Catholic. A great basketball program has no more chances.

The Crusaders weren’t favored to win Division I. Not this year. They were seeded 10th and heading toward a tough secondround matchup at Hillhouse Wednesday night. Yet there are fewer programs prouder. Trinity Catholic has seven state basketball titles and produced talent like Rashamel Jones, who played on UConn’s first national championship. Facing a financial crisis, Trinity Catholic also is closing its doors for good at the end of the school year.

Monday night, an opening-round tournament win over Notre Dame-Fairfield, was the last home game played at Walsh Gym.

“It was an electric atmosphere,” Kriftcher said. “The fact that coach Walsh was on the bench with me and I love and respect him so much, you can’t get away from the tradition of the place. So many of the oldtimers came back. All of our kids got in. Some poignant stuff.

“And then this happens.” Trinity Catholic’s last game is no game. Same for the seniors around the state who play no spring sports or will not play in college. Everyone who loves sports hurts for them.

“We understand and appreciate the emotion that sports brings,” Lungarini said. “Seniors were looking forward to that last game, looking forward to making that run to the championship. They get hit with news now they are not going to have the ability to do that. We respect and understand how difficult that can be for them as well as their parents and others.

“I would encourage them to think about what they have been able to accomplish not only this year but throughout their playing career. Often times when you look back on this, it’s rare you look back on a specific moment or championship. I think what you appreciate down the road is the relationships that you developed and time you shared with your peers and friends.”

He was underselling the thrill of a state title some in my mind, yet Lungarini did play on a baseball national championship team at Eastern Connecticut.

“When I think back to the best times I had, it’s not necessarily the championship I remember the most. It’s the practices, the time I spent with my teammates,” he said. “As they look back on that in the future, I think they will appreciate that more. But, certainly, today I understand that emotion and impact to feel that it was taken from them.”

That’s called perspective. Does any of it make those young athletes feel any better. Of course not. At least not today.

No sooner had Lungarini started his press conference than the Ivy League announced its basketball tournament at Harvard also had been canceled. Yale, the regular-season champion, will advance to the NCAA Tournament.

“Horrible, horrible, horrible decision and total disregard for the players and teams that have put their hearts into this season,” Harvard star Bryce Aikens tweeted. “This is wrong on so many levels and the Ivy League should do its due diligence to find a better solution.”

Look, these decisions weren’t made to destroy the economy. This wasn’t some plot to discredit President Trump in an election year with a fake virus. This wasn’t done in reaction to media purposely spreading panic. And to the great thinkers who point out 57,000 people died last year with the flu, without quarantine, without drastic measures, and fewer than 30 have died so far in America: OK, let’s allow coronavirus, which just hit our shores, run its course without any restriction. Thousands will be dead in weeks. Morons.

Sorry, for that mini-rant. It pains me to see stuff out there ripping people trying to act on behalf of the public good. Look around the world. Italy has stopped all sporting events through at least April 3. Japan has delayed the start of its professional baseball season. With New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo virtually surrounding an area of New Rochelle with the national guard to contain a pocket of the disease only miles from our border, we’re fools if we don’t think the threat is real and changing daily.

An online petition to the CIAC begun by a former Fairfield Prep hockey goalie to have the tournaments restarted and played before no fans had almost 50,000 signatures at 5 p.m. Tuesday. It’s certainly not an absurd idea at 5 p.m. Tuesday. Yet what about Thursday or Saturday or next Wednesday or Sunday. Two weeks is a long time with a fast-moving contagious disease.

To try to juggle daily tournament locations with a total of 148 games and three days in the pool gone remaining — with some school districts already informing the CIAC it wouldn’t participate in upcoming games — would be daunting logistically. And what happens when something like Region 14 schools (Bethlehem and Woodbury) closing its doors for the rest of the week happens again. And again. I was told by a few advocates, hey, just have those teams forfeit.

Many people were all over the fact that schools are still open and hundreds of kids in classes are a greater risk than 20 in a gym. True. And if you leave that school, go across state, catch coronavirus from another kid demonstrating no symptoms, return home and spread it to your much more at risk grandparents, it could kill them. Besides, on-line mandatory courses already are starting in colleges and within a few weeks we could be looking at that in high schools, too.

“On a more philosophical level, I guess, I cannot help but feel adults are rapidly and continually robbing things from kids in this day and age,” Kritchner said. “The innocence that kids were meant to enjoy and sports is supposed to represent seem long gone. It’s hard for kids not to feel that adults are screwing them up pretty good. Adults are supposed to make kids feel safe. Either people aren’t being told as much as people know about this thing or society has become so litigious that adults are more interested in covering their asses than they are protecting the mental health of kids.”

That is some heavy-duty philosophy, coach.

My only response is that some of the people screaming the loudest at the CIAC for canceling the event would be first in line to sue the organization and the member schools if it was proven they contracted the coronavirus at a tournament game.

“It’s unfair to cancel the tournament,” said Trinity Catholic senior Rahsen Fisher. “It’s not right to take away our team’s last chance at a championship.”

It hurts to read Rahsen’s words, doesn’t it?

It hurts for all our kids who lost that last chance at a championship.