There’s no way that you weren’t a little bit jealous on Sept. 1.

No way that, for at least the first half-dozen times ESPN showed Corey Lynch’s blocked kick that finalized Appalachian State’s 34-32 victory over then-No.5 Michigan in a belittled Big House, you didn’t wish you went to school in the land of the Mountaineers, Boone, N.C.

Rarely before had the tragedy of college life in Vestal been so evident: Binghamton University has never had a football team.

In a three-piece feature for Pipe Dream last fall, Randy Benjenk laid out the reasons why, according to those in the know and in power, there is no football and likely never will be, with the bottom line being just that ‘ money.

‘If you’re not playing at the Bowl Championship level, it’s almost impossible to make money,’ said BU athletics director Joel Thirer.

Appalachian State is one of the likely exceptions to Thirer’s rule. The Mountaineers, playing at the I-AA level ‘ rather, Football Championship Subdivision ‘ are the two-time defending national champions. They had won 15 straight games entering week one ‘ now 16. Appalachian State is the elite exception.

At Binghamton, Glenn G. Bartle, one of the school’s early deans, inhibited any plans for a BU football team, and similar efforts have been unsuccessful.

‘It would have been easier to have had a football team now had we had one from the beginning,’ Thirer said in Benjenk’s 2006 article.

The bottom line? That’s an excuse that simply shifts the blame (perhaps fairly so).

And make no mistake ‘ there is blame to be handed out ‘ Binghamton University should have a football team. It needs one if it hopes to become the prestigious school it thinks it’s becoming now.

For a moment, let’s forget the fiscal logistics, the finger-pointing, the glitz. Think purely in sport.

You had to empathize with every single Appalachian State fan (or maybe if you’re a Yankees fan, with Michigan). You had to wish you could have been there, in the way the fans are always tangibly a part of the game.

Were Binghamton to start a football program, it could not rival a school of Michigan’s caliber for generations. It would probably take just a little less time for Binghamton to compare to Appalachian State.

But somebody has to start somewhere, even if it should have been done a long time ago.

Wear your ‘Binghamton University Football, Undefeated Since 1946’ T-shirts with pride. You can’t lose if you don’t play ‘ but you sure can’t beat Michigan.