Senior Night started like a Hollywood screenplay.

The script went like this: After suffering a season-long slump, senior Winston Blake began the game sinking his first two treys. After the second basket, Northwestern coach Bill Carmody walked down the bench and shook the hand of freshman T.J. Parker, who gave up his starting spot so Blake could shine in his final home game.

“(Blake) was just lighting it up,” Parker said. “It looked like he was going to light it up all night.”

But near the end of the game the script went awry, like the last half hour of “Adaptation.”

With 10 seconds left and NU down by three, senior Aaron Jennings caught the ball behind the 3-point line. Everybody in the arena knew that NU’s second-best 3-point shooter was going to put up the shot. And since it was Senior Night, he was going to make it and send the game into overtime. It was going to be perfect.

Of course, it didn’t end that way. Jennings tossed the ball over Blake’s head. Nobody knows why. If Blake had caught the pass and hit a layup, the Cats still would have been down by one with less than 10 seconds to play.

Senior Night at Welsh-Ryan Arena ended exactly as any knowledgeable fan would expect — with an upperclassman messing up.

Nothing personal. The seniors are all nice guys. But they’re cursed.

How else can you explain that since their freshman year, 10 players have left the team. Or that last season — even though the Cats enjoyed their best record since 1982-83 — they were shut out of the NIT. And this season, with momentum from last year and an exciting freshman class, the Cats lost their best player, Vedran Vukusic, to a shoulder injury in an exhibition game.

And it’s not just the basketball team that suffers from the jinx.

Look at the football team. A year after a senior class that included Kustok, D.A., Napo and Bentley, we had, umm … Raheem Covington and Kevin Lawrence?

The seniors on the women’s basketball team don’t even get a chance to be memorable. None of them start, and only Natalie Will plays significant minutes.

Outside the world of sports, it gets even worse. Under the “leadership” of seniors, the Associated Student Government has gone through its most embarrassing and incompetent year in recent memory. Seniors have steered Dance Marathon — NU’s most foolproof philanthropy — into scandal. And it was a senior who founded the NU chapter of ACLU, only to run it into the ground.

Even here at The Daily, only a handful of seniors are worth the dollar an hour we’re paid. And by Friday, we’ll all be done here and getting used to being unemployed.

But basketball — certainly more than this rag — needs leadership. And our seniors led the Cats like Dorothy on the yellow brick road. Blake was the Tin Man, Jennings the Cowardly Lion and Jason Burke the Scarecrow. Except Burke has a brain — he just has no game.

And just like Dorothy, the younger Cats are going to have to rid themselves of their companions before they can meet the Wizard of Oz.