About that Saint Mary’s-Gonzaga basketball series, yes, bartender, I’ll have another. In fact, since it’s closing time, gimme two.

And give me them on a four-year contract, alternating between Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle and the Chase Center in San Francisco. That ought to slake the thirsts of fans in two of the most hoops-centric cities in the galaxy.

If only it were that easy. By all rights, it ought to be a slam-dunk, keeping alive a sizzling rivalry that ends – ostensibly – early next week in the West Coast Conference tournament. In a sporting world more dizzying by the day, hardly anything has held up as well as the Saint Mary’s-Gonzaga series, now rendered moribund by the fact the Zags have finally opted out of the WCC and will join the reconstituted Pac-12 next season.

In a region of the country whose formidability in college basketball has been sporadic in this century, there hasn’t been a lot to criticize about Saint Mary’s-Gonzaga. The coaches, Randy Bennett and Mark Few, have camped at their respective schools for a quarter-century. They’ve met 67 times, a ridiculous number. Thirteen times in the last 17 WCC tournaments, they’ve met in the final.

Now it’s done, unless resolute and imaginative minds can keep it going.

It shouldn’t be surrendered easily.

I spoke this week with Gonzaga athletic director Chris Standiford, who was non-committal about a continuation of the rivalry. Not dismissive, just uncertain.

“We’ll see where it goes,” he said. “There’s a lot of dynamics on both sides.

“Mark and Randy have a really good relationship, and that’s the building block. I haven’t had a conversation with Mark or Randy about it.”

Indeed, there are a lot of dynamics. Among them, networks doing college basketball have exacting rules about other networks doing games in their “footprint.” Gonzaga leaves a conference whose rights-holder is ESPN, and goes into one where the rights-holder is CBS, and that’s a complicating factor.

So would be sites. There’s a lot of fan sentiment that if the rivalry is to continue, it ought to stay in the McCarthey Athletic Center in Spokane and Saint Mary’s University Credit Union Pavilion. One, the MAC, is smallish at 6,000 capacity. The other is untenable as a non-league proposition.

To me, this feels like trying to squeeze into a pair of pants that you’ve outgrown. If the vibe is going to be intrinsically different as a non-league game, why not thrust it forth into major arenas and say, this is what it’s grown into?

Perhaps it’s not that easy. I don’t have much doubt that scheduling a game like that in Climate Pledge would put at least 15,000 people in the seats. It might not be so easy in the Bay Area (both arenas hold a little more than 18,000), with the Saint Mary’s fan base not as broad as Gonzaga’s. Given that, it’s possible Bennett would want to host such a game in his own gym.

“Usually there’s a promoter involved,” said Standiford, referring to the neutral-site proposition. “And does that promoter think it’s going to sell out at a premium price, that’s the question.”

If such a series went off-campus, Spokane Arena becomes a viable alternative. But that would demand a comparable facility in the Bay Area.

Other GU-Gaels observations:

 It’s impossible not to be impressed at how quickly Bennett retooled this team. He lost four of his top five scorers from last year, and two players who didn’t start a game, Mikey Lewis and Joshua Dent, are all-conference this year.

 While Bennett teams have crashed the NCAA tournament 11 times in a tenure that began in 2001-02, Saint Mary’s has created far less thunder in the Big Dance than its rival, advancing to the Sweet 16 only in 2009-10. Recent parity in the league hasn’t equated to success beyond.

 Worth watching is how aggressive Few is in generating a non-league schedule as a member of the new Pac-12. He’s consistently had appealing non-league schedules to balance the relative frailty of the WCC, but now there will be several more land mines.

The guess here is, he might ease off the throttle only a little, because those national-caliber matchups are good for the brand. And the game.

“Mark has become a leader in trying to grow the sport in November and December,” Standiford said.

Here’s one more item on the to-do list: Go get the Gaels.