The sky has officially fallen for good on the sun-speckled wheat fields of the Palouse, as well as the rain-swept plains of central Oregon and on both banks of the San Francisco Bay.

That’s because, with one fell swoop, two media empires have taken a butcher’s knife to a century-old collective of colleges, cleaving the once-proud Pacific 12 Conference in a flash.

Eight of the 12 members will abscond to “greener” pastures, whether it be the Big Ten (in Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington’s case) or the Big 12 (in Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah’s).

They’ll all glad-hand each other all the same, putting out 300-word nothingburger press releases that highlight athletic excellence and some vapid phrase like “synergy” or “innovation.”

What those back-slapping bundles of electrons and hubris leave out of the fray are the futures of dozens of college athletes, whose championship aspirations just went up in smoke with the swipe of a pen.

How will Stanford’s championship level women’s basketball team continue to be an elite program competing inside the Mountain West or Big West conferences, which have produced exactly … zero titles between them in the modern era.

How will Oregon State’s long proud baseball program, which won the College World Series in 2006, 2007 and 2018, do so when the university’s competing against the Long Beach States and San Jose States of the world, instead of UCLA and Arizona.

These are the futures that university presidents at the eight deserting schools conveniently skip past when they discuss the “bright days ahead” for their respective schools.

Those same presidents take great strides to pummel Congress creatures about passing NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) legislation that’ll curtail an athlete’s opportunity to make a few thousand dollars, while jumping ship to another boat to ensure their school gets what’s perceived as “theirs.”

If there’s a scrap of a silver lining to be found in this week’s amateur hour, it’s that the naked hypocrisy of collegiate athletics at the “Power Five” level has been fully exposed.

Now we can only hope those fallen skies that dot the various college towns of the West will one day shine again, under the brightened skies that could come from a rebalanced athletic system that treats athletes and administrators as equals, rather than the perverse state that allowed this week’s network-sponsored plundering to take place.