A few years ago, the International Olympic Committee had a problem: an overload of sports. The Games had grown too big. Cost too much.

The solution was clear. A sport or two needed to be eliminated. So the Olympic hammer was brought down full force on . . .

Softball?

Good old red-blooded, pony-tailed American softball? The only sport that women can play at a high level if they love pitching and catching and hitting?

Yup. That very same softball. After these Olympics, it’s gone. Ousted. Exiled. Won’t be a part of the 2012 Games in London.

That’s why the U.S. team here should really be nicknamed the Softballsauruses. Even as they began their quest for a fourth straight gold medal with Tuesday’s 11-0 victory over Venezuela, they are facing Olympic extinction.

“Who knows what the reasons were?” asked Lauren Lappin, the Stanford alum who is a utility player for the U.S. team. “We’re just trying to get it back for 2016.”

Theoretically, that is possible. The IOC says that sometime next year, the organization will reconsider softball as a possibility for the 2016 Games, wherever they are played. But the return is a long shot. The last sport to be eliminated from the Olympics was polo, back in 1936. It has never come close to rejoining the schedule.

Also, Lappin is being a tad coy when she claims ignorance about the cause of softball’s Olympic demise. All along, the IOC has pointed to the budget as the culprit.

Building softball-specific venues is very expensive. Stadiums constructed for the sport at Athens in 2004 and Sydney in 2000 have gone largely unused since. The IOC thought the same held true for baseball stadiums. That’s why baseball also will be eliminated from the Olympic roster after these Games.

You do wonder, however, why softball and baseball are being tied together so closely. Olympic baseball does not feature the game’s best players, who work in the majors. And apart from the Olympics, baseball has its own more prominent championship event, the World Series.

By contrast, softball has . . . this. The Olympics are the sport’s biggest bang. You’d think the IOC would love that.

Nope. And so the U.S. players have developed a pragmatic approach to the next two weeks. That includes Monica Abbott, the ace pitcher from Salinas who was a four-time All-American at Tennessee.

“We want to enjoy every moment and take advantage of this experience,” Abbott said. “For someone like me, even if softball comes back for 2016, I will be 30 or 31 years old. Who knows if I will be on the team?”

What makes Abbott sad, when she allows herself to feel sad, is thinking about all the little girls who will never have what she had, the chance to dream about competing for their country every four years on such a huge stage.

Softball will hardly vanish from the globe. But the real concern for Abbott and her teammates is that, without Olympic softball to which they can aspire, young girls who might have played the game will pick another sport.

The language spoken most fluently in the IOC is money. You get the feeling that if some corporate sponsor came along to pay for softball venue construction at the 2016 Olympic host city, probably Rio de Janeiro or Madrid or Chicago, then the sport would be right back in the picture.