A former colleague who is involved in grassroots soccer may still be in mourning.

He was adamant that the U.S. Soccer Federation needed new blood at the top … but the presidential election over the weekend went the way of the two establishment candidates, with the former federation vice president and Goldman Sachs partner (no, really) winning election on the third ballot.

Congrats, Carlos Cordeiro!

We’re confident you will meet the little people — just as soon as you hire someone to make the introductions.

Cordeiro, 61, was one of eight candidates running to replace Sunil Gulati in the unpaid presidency role, and Cordeiro survived the first round of voting thanks to the unanimous support of professional soccer players. Which either says something good about Cordeiro or something bad about the players.

Their support allowed the India native and former Gulati ally to hold off Kathy Carter, president of Soccer United Marketing — “the marketing arm of Major League Soccer”, whose candidacy collapsed when MLS went over to Cordeiro in the third round, giving him 69 percent of the vote and victory.

Meanwhile, the folks at the bottom of the U.S. soccer heap, parents and poor kids and unpaid coaches watching games played on vacant lots, remain disenfranchised, and it is hard to see how they will be able to move forward in the direction (and with the speed) they had hoped for if their candidate, former national team striker Eric Wynalda, had been elected.

My former colleague was more than a little partisan in this.

He said: “Missing this summer’s [World Cup] has made leadership change necessary. Sunil is out and now it’s either Eric or we riot in the streets! Anything less and we have failed and are doomed to mediocrity.

“I’m less-than-half joking.”

No riots to report.

So, what happens next?

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Elfrid Payton is a point guard drafted out of Louisiana Lafeyette by the Orlando Magic with the 10th pick of the 2014 draft. Last week, the Magic traded him to the Phoenix Suns in a move from one bad team to another.

Payton is best known for one thing: His comically long hair. Which is an impression a man playing in the NBA probably should not accept, let alone embrace.

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I first interviewed Bonny Warner in February of 1984, a week before the Sarajevo Olympics.

She grew up in Mount Baldy Village, a hamlet on the shoulder of the mountain, and went to school in San Bernardino County, where our newspaper circulated.

So we snapped to attention when we realized that a college kid from our market was a U.S. qualifier for an Olympic event. Even if it was what, at the time, seemed like a particularly exotic sport:

Luge.

An Olympic standard since 1964, mostly overlooked in the U.S.

The story got more interesting as we dug into it. It was about a series of not-particularly-likely events that led to Warner being considered an outside candidate for a medal in Yugoslavia — despite the fact that no American had ever medalled in luge.

In three tries, she never did win that medal, though she came close in Calgary 1988, when she was sixth. But her story was interesting enough and she was good enough at the high-speed sliding event that she earned the respect of the Europeans who dominated the sport and became a sort of ambassador for luge in the U.S.

She was involved in clinics to help identify and recruit promising candidates for her sport; I seem to remember sleds on wheels being sent down the road from Mount Baldy.

By Nagano 1998, the breakthrough came; American men won silver and bronze in the men’s doubles. In Sochi 2014, an American woman won a bronze.

That left only men’s singles as an event with zero American medal-winners and, today, that box was checked when Chris Mazdzer earned a silver medal at the Pyeongchang Games.

And somewhere, Bonny Warner smiled.

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It ought to be, right? Cold. Plenty cold. Unpleasantly cold. It’s the Winter Olympics and we have sports based on snow and ice.

Opening Ceremonies for the Pyeongchang Games were held tonight, in South Korea, and it did not look like a shorts-and-T-shirt sort of event, no.

Well, duh.

It seems the current generation of Olympics media are not clear on the concept. Perhaps because the last three Winter Olympics were not particularly wintry — as this graphic (scroll toward the bottom of the item) on accuweather.com makes clear.

These Winter Games are expected to be the coldest since Lillehammer 1994, 24 years ago.

I was there, in Norway.

To get to Lillehammer, go to Oslo and turn north. Drive for several hours till you are at nearly 62 degrees of latitude — which is not all that far from the Arctic Circle, at 66 degrees (and change) north.

I loved the Lillehammer Games, as I have mentioned several times on this blog. The best of the six Winter Games I covered; people who live there embrace the winter, and it felt like a particularly legitimate winter experience — unlike Sochi 2014, for example, when temperatures did not reach freezing even once.

My recollection of Lillehammer is that many of the locals slept out on the cross-country course to have a good vantage point the next morning and ring cow bells. Like that.

I was cold in Lillehammer, and often much colder than the folks at the temporary stadium in Pyeongchang were tonight — which apparently was about 27 degrees Fahrenheit, with a cutting wind.

But, too, organizers handed out survival gear to everyone who had a ticket which included a blanket, a rain coats and heating pads. Also, a few tents were put up with space heaters inside. No one ever handed me a blanket as I went to Winter opening.

Back to Lillehammer. That was serious winter, and I have some recollections. Of course I do. (I have done a separate item on generic recollections of covering sports in the cold.)

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No one rides high forever. We may think we will, but it never quite ends that way. Life and/or death humbles us.

That notion hit me again tonight, as the Cleveland Cavaliers offloaded guard Isaiah Thomas to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Eight months ago, Thomas finished fifth in the NBA’s Most Valuable Player voting, just ahead of Stephen Curry, just behind LeBron James, after averaging 28.9 points per game for the Boston Celtics, the Eastern Conference’s top-seeded playoffs team.

The gritty, even reckless little point guard, all of 5-foot-9, then led the Celtics to the finals of the conference finals, versus Cleveland, after they ousted the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards.

In Game 2 of the Cleveland series, Thomas’s right hip pretty much broke. He could not return to the series, won by the Cavaliers in five games.

And his descent from “star player for the best team in the Eastern Conference” began.

Starting with the realization that Thomas, a “bargain” player in Year 3 of a four-season, $27 million contract, is not going to get that sort of exorbitant payday a player with his success over three seasons in Boston could expect.

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The Winter Olympics is an acquired taste. Unless you grew up where winter dominates life. Say, Russia. Norway. Lapland. Buffalo.

The Winter Games generally are held in a city/town that is hard to get to (from places where people actually live) and feature a lot of winding mounting roads that either are icy or slushy. Either way, you probably are wearing the wrong shoes.

The Winter Games entail about 12 days of action stretched over 17 days of competition. Which actually is an improvement over the Winter of decades past, which was maybe seven days of action dragged out over 11 days.

(I covered one of those, Sarajevo 1984; if a blizzard hadn’t descended and wiped out a couple of days of programming I’m not sure what we were supposed to do for those 11 days.)

Still and all, I recommend dropping by a Winter Games, if it happens to land within a couple of days’ drive of where you live.

But just the one.

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Many members of my generation have been space enthusiasts since childhood. We spent lots of hours in our teens watching manned flights sent up by the U.S. Space Agency, usually know by the acronym NASA.

The original goal, as outlined by President Kennedy in 1960, was getting a manned spacecraft to the moon … and putting astronauts on the lunar surface.

Anyone alive in June of 1969 remembers when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. It was astonishing.

Several more lunar landings followed, and then NASA seemed to decide nothing else could be made of the moon, at that point in time, and no one has been on the moon since.

The global idea now seems to be that space flight has two reasons to exist, going forward.

1) As a for-profit industry interested mostly in putting space tourists into low orbit, and bringing them back.

2) Blue-skying about going to Mars.

And it seems like humankind took a step toward the latter today when SpaceX, mostly funded by billionaire Elon Musk, sent a satellite into space that will do elliptical orbits of Mars.

We might be getting somewhere now.

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That was reality that slapped the Los Angeles Lakers in the face.

Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka, the duo responsible for the club’s roster, apparently have been disabused of the notion that a free-agent superstar or two is keen to join their team this summer.

According to espn.com, the Lakers no longer are banking that the Summer of ’18 will be all about them — and an instant return to the club’s historic role as championship contender.

Which is good news for Lakers fans, who were wondering just how the team was going to pull that off.

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I missed it. I have no trouble saying it. I was sure the New England Patriots would defeat the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl 52. And I first wrote that nearly three weeks ago, ahead of the conference championship games.

Not so sure, however, that I did not watch Super Bowl 52. Not so sure that I shut off the TV, in France, when the Patriots finally moved ahead, at about 4 a.m. local time.

My sense of the inevitability of a Patriots victory was fully engaged when Tom Brady and the Patriots got the ball, trailing 38-33, with more than two minutes to play.

How many times had we seen Brady push the Patriots down the field to win in the waning seconds? This was going to another example of that. The Eagles defense was in tatters, and I thought their offense had erred by scoring too soon; they should have tried to get a first down at the New England 4, so they could burn the clock down to a few seconds before kicking a winning field goal.

I was unhappy. Because when it comes to the Patriots, I would rather be wrong about them winning.

But I had outlined the inevitability of their victory and had (mostly) resigned myself to it — with the stipulation that I would under no circumstances stay up long enough to see Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick and Brady passing around another Lombardi Trophy.

Then came the play that never happens to the nearly perfect Patriots.

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Goodness, the NBA is awful right now.

Lots of bad teams. Scads of nearly unwatchable games. Good teams unable to produce a genuine effort.

Apparently, it is so difficult to win consecutive games on the road, or back-to-backs anywhere, that we should go back and worship the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors — who somehow went 73-9, setting the NBA record for victories.

This season’s Warriors, who retain the stars of the record-setting team and are in Season 2 of being augmented by the addition of Kevin Durant, have lost two of three, including the second half of a back-to-back in Denver tonight.

And that’s the NBA’s best team.

NBA fans like to talk about how the game is growing, passing boring old baseball, with the NFL in their sights … but anyone who has paid attention since the turn of the year knows the NBA is ragged and disjointed and too often disinterested, at the moment. And

Consider:

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