Jim Copenhaver, Ed Hightower and Art McDonald may as well have stayed home Wednesday night. They did such a poor job

of officiating – bad calls and worse no-calls – that it became intensely unpleasant to watch the game.

If I wanted to watch street ball, I would have driven over to Mason Park, one of Evanston’s top sites for hard-core, full-contact basketball.

Instead, 3,613 fans – which, by the way, was a pitiful showing of support by the Northwestern community – and I stared on with jaws dropped as the Golden Gophers and the Wildcats pushed, shoved, slapped, gouged, grabbed, poked, elbowed, kicked, punched – virtually castrated each other.

Maybe it’s my purple pride showing through, but the majority of the castration was being performed by the Minnesota players. And since NU coach Bill Carmody and the Cats would be reprimanded for complaining about officiating, I will.

The worst scene was when Golden Gophers’ pretty boy Rick Rickert elbowed NU point guard Collier Drayton in the face in the final minutes of the first half, without getting a technical foul.

There was a large crowd of players obscuring the mediation that followed. The referees might have had the two shake hands or just apologize. Who knows. But they didn’t call a technical foul. And the message they sent was to keep fighting. Just kiss and make up afterwards.

Rickert’s a great player – no doubts remain about his talent. But he’s also a big jerk on the court.

His physical play, if that’s what you want to call it, is spreading to the other players on his team. And apparently the referees aren’t willing to call the fouls on them, either.

When Winston Blake stole the ball with five seconds left, Kevin Burleson literally jumped on the NU forward’s back to stop the clock. The play should have been called an intentional foul. If the player isn’t making any effort to get the ball, it’s completely unacceptable to call a regular personal foul. Fortunately, Blake hit the two shots.

And evidently, kicking is also now a legal defensive move.

Just prior to Blake’s steal, with the Cats up by one, NU’s Jason Burke threw a pass that bounced off the foot of Golden Gophers forward Travarus Bennett. In my book – as well as the NCAA basketball rulebook – that’s a violation. Reset the shot clock and give the offensive team the ball. But there was no whistle.

The refs also missed a blatant traveling violation by Burleson with eight minutes left. The 6-foot-3 guard took about a half-dozen steps (including standing up from a sitting position with a questionable dribble) to set himself up for a three-pointer. Had he made the shot, the Welsh-Ryan crowd might have showered the court with debris.

Earlier, someone sitting behind the east basket threw a piece of trash at a referee for making one of the numerous bad calls. But that, of course, was even dumber than any of Rickert’s tactics and a worse crime than the referees’ myopia.

So to summarize Wednesday’s game:

_Ѣ Almost nobody went. The majority of the NU student body chose not to make the trip to Welsh-Ryan, thus missing Jitim Young’s five-point possession and one of the Cats’ most exciting comebacks in recent memory.

_Ѣ The referees were terrible. They completely failed to create any semblance of order, transforming the game into some sort of wrestling-kickboxing hybrid. (On that note, my money’s on Drayton if he and Rickert ever go at it again).

_Ѣ The game was just a mess from the start. It was so quiet at the beginning of the night that fans could easily hear Aaron Jennings getting slapped across the forearm by Minnesota defenders on consecutive possessions.

In case you hadn’t guessed, the refs missed both calls.