It was the wrong thing to do for all the right reasons.

Katie Hnida became the first woman to play in an NCAA Division I-A football game Wednesday when she attempted an extra point for New Mexico against UCLA in the Las Vegas Bowl.

The kick was low, it was wobbly and it was blocked by Bruin linebacker Brandon Chillar. The kick never had a chance, not even close. If Chillar’s hand had not hit the ball, any one of another six hands would have.

Women are not strong enough to play big-time college football, not even as kickers. Making extra points in practice is not the same as facing athletes such as Chillar, a 6-foot-3, 234-pound man, running at your face.

Hnida is not small. She is 5-foot-9, 150 pounds. But on this field, when she trotted in from the sidelines, Hnida disappeared into the huddle. Her waist and thighs and chest are tinier than any of the men.

New Mexico coach Rocky Long said Hnida earned her chance to become the first woman to play in a Division I-A game.

Long said Hnida works hard, practices hard, puts up with the hardships of dressing by herself, of walking away from her teammates after games to take a solitary shower, of hearing the whispered comments and disparaging insults.

She has never complained, Long said. She has never asked for favors or special treatment.

Hnida considers Long a special kind of hero, a man of “courage and integrity,” she said.

When Heather Sue Mercer sued former Duke football coach Fred Goldsmith for not giving Mercer a fair chance to make the Blue Devil team, the suit was considered an insurmountable hurdle for other women who might want to try out for a man’s team.

What would be the upside for a coach who decided the female wasn’t good enough if he was afraid to cut her for fear of a lawsuit?

But even after an unpleasant experience at Colorado, where Hnida played for a year, she wasn’t able to give up her dream.

Hnida said she belongs on a Division I-A football team, that she makes all her extra points in practice, that her leg strength is fine, that she is not intimidated by men twice her size running at her.

So this wasn’t what it seemed at first — a stunt, a cheap holiday trick. You know, put the football chick into the Christmas Day game, a second-level bowl game.

ESPN cameras could focus on Hnida’s blond ponytail and blood-red fingernails. Less attention had to be paid to a mostly dreadful football game.

“Anybody who says, just because of this one miss, that I can’t play or shouldn’t play, they have stuck their foot in their mouth and they can take it out when I’m the starter next year,” Hnida said.

She won’t. She can’t. Football is not the place where women can be competitive with men.

Whether anybody likes it or not, whether it’s fair or not, men are bigger, stronger, usually faster. Men have more leg strength, 99.9 percent of them, and will be able to kick higher and farther.

Dreams don’t always have happy endings.

“I just wish she had made it,” UCLA punter Nate Fikse said, “because there will be people who will say she shouldn’t be out there.”

It’s not that she shouldn’t. It’s just that there seems to be no point.