I can’t blame the referees. Or the NCAA selection committee.

San Diego State is on the hook for this one. The Aztecs left too much to chance by not winning enough winnable games.

So SDSU will sit out an NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time since 2019, an unsurprising outcome that was revealed Sunday when the at-large berths went to other fringe candidates.

Winnable games?

I’m thinking of the home-court losses to Troy and Grand Canyon.

The neutral-court loss to a middling Baylor team.

Road defeats to Colorado State, Grand Canyon, New Mexico and Boise State.

All of them avoidable in their own way, those setbacks squeezed the Aztecs’ chances of making it six consecutive trips to the March fiesta since the pandemic canceled the ’20 tournament.

Banners in the arena aren’t the only measure of an Aztecs basketball season.

San Diego State took us on a journey that was almost always interesting and often entertaining.

And unusually weird.

The players lived up to the program’s high standard of hustle and grit. For their resilience, much respect goes to the players, coach Brian Dutcher and his assistants.

A day after they lost by 40 points to future No. 1 seed Michigan, for example, the Aztecs beat Oregon’s well-funded program in a November tournament in Las Vegas. Four Aztecs, bookended by senior Reese Dixon-Waters and freshman Elzie Harrington, scored in double figures that day.

Late in the season, bruised by losing four of five games, SDSU responded with an exciting win over UNLV and two victories in the Mountain West Tournament, the latter on BJ Davis’ basket with two seconds left.

By winning its third game in three days, the Aztecs could’ve avoided rolling the dice on the selection committee’s calculations.

Facing Utah State, Saturday, with the conference’s automatic NCAAs berth on the line, the Aztecs led 50-49 with 10 minutes to go.

Then came one of this team’s many ill-timed funks.

Utah State sharpened its game, the Aztecs erred too often, on both offense and defense, and the Aggies — yes, assisted by an officiating mistake that led to a pair of free throws — ran away to a 72-63 victory.

One final winnable game had slipped away, forcing the Aztecs and their fans to beg for a mulligan.

Ultimately, they didn’t get one.

What made this Aztecs season unusually weird? Begin in the very beginning.

The opening seven-plus minutes of the first game, an exhibition against UCLA, saw State go scoreless.

Aztecs fans, getting a workout in, stood and clapped for the entire drought.

Calming down, the players found their flow. They erased most of the 17-point gap, losing 67-60 to a Bruins club that will play in the NCAA Tournament this week.

“We said, ‘Come on, let’s pick this up,’” sophomore guard Taj DeGourville said of the seven-plus minutes that felt like seven hours. “It was a wake-up call.”

Another weird one: Troy scored 51 points in the second half, surviving Miles Byrd’s half-court shot that created overtime, and winning 108-107 in two overtimes. “It looked like this game was just racing each other to see who could score the most points,” Dutcher said, “and that’s not Aztec basketball.”

The Aztecs were like the weather in Colorado — an adventure.

From one game to the next, the players’ effort could be counted upon. But both the defense and the offense fluctuated quite a bit. Concentration issues appeared to crop up.

One of several players I couldn’t figure out was Davis, a junior guard from Modesto. He has a lot of talent. He had a respectable season. Can he become more consistent?

It’s on to the Pac-12 for a program that can expect Gonzaga to raise the competitive bar.

There’s too much change in the wind to make a forecast, but the Aztecs’ commitment to and mastery of defense, rebounding and culture should bode well.

My lone request is the same one I have every year: one knockdown shooter.