Thank you, Oberlin College, for turning your back on Bates College and slapping a big, Post-It “kick me” sign on your maize-and-maroon field hockey windbreakers.

You just can’t find enough easy targets in the athletic arena. The NCAA, Mike Tyson and the Minnesota Vikings come to mind, naturally, but new blood almost never serves up a belt-high fastball on an otherwise rainy, non-descript day as Oberlin and its field hockey program did by flat-out quitting Tuesday afternoon.

Our silver screen friends Tom Hanks and Rosie O’Donnell taught us that there’s no crying in baseball. Now that a lockout-damaged league has come to its senses, put itself in the fan’s seat and joined the 21st century, there is no tying in hockey.

And let it be known from Oberlin to Orono and all outposts in between that there should be no quitting in sports. Ever.

The Yeowomen (more about that egregious butchering of the Queen’s English later) elected to warm up the bus and skedaddle out of town at halftime, forfeiting their contest at Campus Avenue Field.

Never mind that Oberlin was winning 2-1. Never mind that the hallmarks of a good team in any sport include winning on the road and fighting the elements. And Tuesday’s elements were relatively tame, by Maine standards in the week leading up to Halloween: rain mixed with sleet; gusty winds; temperatures teetering on the edge of freezing.

Heck, I’ve covered football, soccer and field hockey state championships played in more miserable conditions, not to mention regular-season baseball games.

Oberlin begged for mercy because its players were “shuddering and hunching over inside a dormitory during halftime,” according to a Bates news release.

Coach Deb Ranieri cited a league game against Wittenberg this Saturday, one that might settle the North Coast Athletic Conference championship. She implied that the second half of a non-league game wasn’t worth the risk of illness or injury.

Maybe the, er, Yeowomen simply couldn’t afford the psychological stigma of a loss to Bates, which entered the game 5-7 and will finish no better than .500 for the seventh time in eight years. The Bobcats had just sliced the lead in half on a goal by freshman Rachel Greenwood and possibly had their visitor on the ropes.

We’ll never know. What a waste of time. And what a lesson in selfishness to teach young adults.

Oberlin covered more than 800 interstate bus miles to play the game.

That, in itself, is a questionable decision by an institution that according to its own Web page is one of only 11 liberal arts colleges in America to receive “exceptional” academic ratings from both U.S. News & World Report and Fiske Guide to Colleges. But hypocrisy in the world of higher learning isn’t headline news, so we can let that student-unfriendly scheduling slide.

We also could have a field day with the fact that Oberlin’s female athletic teams refer to themselves as the Yeowomen (pronounced, “Yo, Women,” which sounds like the censored, Wal-Mart version of a Snoop Dogg CD title).

Talk about political correctness run amok. The nickname is a nonsense variation of “yeomen,” which by definition were members of the British working class or Royal Guard. If the nickname offends your sensibilities, change the stinkin’ thing. I’ll say it again: The day an editor requires me to use the term “second baseperson” or “player-to-player defense” in a story is the day I make a career move that requires asking the customer if he prefers to super size for 39 cents extra.

And I’ll even be there to guard the grill when the weather’s bad. Real yeomen, after all, don’t have the luxury of showing up for work when they feel like it, or when the payoff meets their delusively grand standards. Neither do sports teams.

Imagine if Bates had signed off at halftime of its 41-7 football loss to Middlebury last week, with coach Mark Harriman declaring, “Well, you know, we’ve got Bowdoin and Colby coming up, and it’s really important for us to be healthy for the CBB games.”

Or picture the Lewiston Maineiacs e-mailing Newfoundland to report, “We have some guys nicked up, and it’s important for us to be financially and physically ready for our next homestand rather than risk a weekend in St. John’s.”

Then again, Oberlin could have saved some face by calling off this debacle before it happened. They do have The Weather Channel in Ohio, right? Most of us knew last Friday that this storm was on its way.

Instead, the Gowomen ended their whistle stop in Lewiston with two words: We quit.

I’m inspired to end with two of my own: Go, Wittenberg.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].