This was so awful I actually felt badly for my English colleagues at The National.

Well, not quite. But I was edging in that direction on the emotional spectrum. OK, I’d taken a tentative step … and then I just laughed.

I believe even American soccer fans have become aware of the train wreck of a coal-mine collapse of a nuclear meltdown that is “England and PKs in a major tournament.”

And it went down again tonight. Call if the Night of the Ashleys.

How to put this in context for Yanks?

Imagine we really cared about only one sport. Say, basketball.

Imagine that we invented/codified the sport and exported it worldwide.

Imagine we had the best basketball league in the world in our country, and the elite of world basketball came to our land to play — and we became conditioned to a high level of play as well as someone actually winning at the end of the year. Not always our club, but somebody inside our borders.

Imagine that a major international competition rolled around every two years — say, the world championships and the Olympics — and that we inventors/popularizers/avid consumers of the game had not seen our team win either one since 1966 …

And that on no fewer than six occasions in 22 years (six out of 12 possible) we had gone into overtime and didn’t make our free throws and lost every time.

That is what has happened to England. Except in soccer.

To examine the history of it is to be appalled/impressed.

1990 World Cup: Out in the semis on PKs.

1996 Euro Cup: Out in the semis on PKs. In a competition England hosted. (And where England actually had won a shootout, in the quarters).

1998 World Cup: Out in the quarters on PKs. (I covered this one, in St. Etienne, by the way.)

Euro 2004: Out in the quarters on PKs.

World Cup 2006: Out in the quarters on PKs.

Euro 2012: Out in the quarters on PKs.

What do all these PK failures say about England? Maybe nothing much, early, but now the story is so widely known in England that the players must be extra nervous, these das. I mean, you shouldn’t lose six of seven huge PK duels by random chance, right? And was that going through the minds of Ashley Young when he banged his PK off the bar … and Ashley Cole when he his a soft attempt saved by Gigi Buffon?

Pretty good chance of it.

(I remember the women’s World Cup, last year, and being in the office as England went to PKs in the quarters with France, and I gleefully said to the English in the department: “England? PKs? What could go wrong?” England lost 4-3 — to France, which makes it worse. But you can’t tell me the English women were not thinking, “England never wins a shootout.”)

I suppose on one level England fans can say, “It actually was a tie, and we lost in the ‘lottery’ of the shootout.”

(Though just two months ago I wrote about studies which seem to indicate shootouts are not lotteries.)

It’s not like they got crushed 4-1 by Germany (2010 World Cup round of 16) … and it means they got out of the group!

It is no wonder that many English I know insist they no longer care about their national team which, in fact, often is rather unlikeable. A bunch of dolts and their WAGs, choking when the pressure is on.

But this team seemed to be fairly popular, with a coach (Roy Hodgson) who is hard to dislike and a squad with fewer jerks than usual.

They still lost. In the shootout.

Maybe, if you’re an Englander, you just try to block this out and wait for your Premier League team to get back into action. Soon. Very soon.