Absent with leave (of sense)

 College athletics was missing two scheduled games Saturday, but not for any reason they should have been. Violent death is no travel/weather/flu outbreak issue, after all.

In Charlottesville, Va., instead of playing football, University of Virginia players got up and talked about three of their teammates, shot to death by another student (and former walk-on) on a charter bus at the end of a field trip. Their names were Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D'Sean Perry, and one by one their teammates -- friends -- stood at a podium in front of their photos and talked about their smiles and their laughter and this one time when they said or did something really funny.

It was touching and poignant and there was this awful sadness beneath it all, because this is not where they all should have been on a Saturday afternoon in November. And every one of them knew it.

Clear across the country, meanwhile, two teams of basketball players were not where they should have been, either.

New Mexico and New Mexico State were supposed to play one another at New Mexico, see, but hotheads with guns blew that up, too. In the skinny hours of Saturday morning, outside a residence hall on the New Mexico campus, there was some sort of altercation, and then the guns came out, and, well, you know the rest.

One kid wound up dead. Another, believed to be a New Mexico State player, wound up in the hospital. And the beat goes on, and the beat goes on in a nation too in love with calibration.

I don't know much, but I do know in-state rivalries are supposed to be measured by shots made and rebounds collected, not by gunfire in the depths of the night. They were expecting a big crowd for the game last night, because it's New Mexico-New Mexico State and loyalties are loyalties. But The Pit in Albuquerque sat empty last night, with only echoes and what should have been in attendance.

Two campuses. Two games unplayed. Two absences with leave, you might say, of any sort of sense.

And sadness, of course. Always, and unavoidably, the sadness.