Disappointing.

Yes, it will be disappointing for sports fans to settle for little except televised golf and NASCAR for…

A month?

Two?

More?

Nobody really knows how the coronavirus will affect us going forward, or when crowds might again gather for concerts, political rallies and, yes, sports events.

Maybe that’s why the word “disappointing” had a little bit of the wrong tone when Mark Few repeated it several times on Thursday.

The Gonzaga coach is socially and culturally aware so consistently, and has been for…

Forever, it seems like.

He’s managed to balance competitive fire with real-world understanding in a way that makes you believe he can take any situation and handle it the right way.

But for once, Few didn’t come across like, well, Mark Few when asked about cancellation of the NCAA tournament due to precautions in the midst of this still-growing coronavirus nightmare.

In fact, he sounded a little bit petulant that his Zags, widely expected to be the second overall seed (behind Kansas) in the tournament, will not play any more basketball this season.

SURE, I get it that this was going to be a special kind of March Madness — not only for Gonzaga, but the entire Inland Northwest.

The first round of games in the West Region, which over the years have been slotted into buildings all over this half of the United States, were scheduled for Spokane Arena beginning next Thursday.

It would have a four-day basketball bonanza for the city and a region well deserving of it.

And of course, we’d have had the Zags looming over the whole thing as the West’s No. 1 seed.

So, yes, Few and his players have every right to be disappointed that the tournament has been cancelled for the first time since its inception in 1939.

But in a voice that suggested that he was almost angry about this turn of events, Few made it clear he thought the NCAA could merely have postponed the games — maybe waiting a month or more to see how the nation was holding up under what the World Health Organization now has deemed a global pandemic.

It’s not like Few to get his priorities skewed, and he earns some additional leeway here because he has a hell of a team with three departing seniors, and also because the first weekend’s games would have created a real air of celebration in our neighborhood.

Fair enough, but still…

ALMOST to a person, Few’s colleagues who run big-time programs in the both the men’s and women’s NCAA hoops universe, agreed that they were disappointed.

Shoot, I’m disappointed, too.

But these brother and sister coaches, having that point and expressing sympathy for seniors who would miss March Madness, almost unanimously went straight to applauding the NCAA’s action — however tough to take — because the country and the world are dealing with something we’ve never come across and don’t truly understand.

ESPN commentator Sage Steele said: “We’ve never seen anything like this, and we won’t ever see anything like it again.”

With all due respect, Sage, we don’t know that.

It turns out that we, as a country, were woefully unprepared for the arrival of this virus — almost as though we thought it couldn’t jump oceans.

More than once on Thursday, some figure in the sports world said something like: “Calling everything off makes sense because this is such an unknown.”

Actually, no.

Not anymore.

What is still unknown is the speed of contagion, how various authorities from the federal government on down can get their acts together, and ultimately what the monster’s impact on the United States might turn out to be.

Now THAT last one is definitely unknown, but we’ve seen that this thing can kill — and likewise that it can infect two exceptionally healthy NBA players.

I believe the scientists: The coronavirus is not something to be dismissed.

Not even for March Madness, baseball’s opening day or The Masters…

You don’t just roll the dice with this thing.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.

Steve’s various tales from several decades in sports — “Moments, Memories and Madness” — run on Sundays.