Let’s call it like it is: Joel Thirer made the right choice in suspending Kevin Broadus.

The coach made a mistake. He lost his cool and shoved another coach. He wasn’t on the bench for the final regular season game of his first season as Bearcat’s head coach and had to watch from a hotel room.

But that doesn’t mean Broadus was wrong.

Suspension doesn’t have to be a bad word, and in this case it’s not.

Broadus is like the high school quarterback who had to miss homecoming because he knocked out some stoner for harassing his girlfriend, or the Pedro Martinez’s who know drilling the other team’s shortstop can mean more than balls and strikes.

Albany head coach Will Brown insulted Broadus’ team, his family. You don’t do that to Kevin Broadus, to Binghamton, and not expect ramifications.

All season long Broadus has been preaching about team; about no player being bigger than the name on their chest; about this not being about coaches and players, but just team.

But Brown made it about players, and he inadvertently made it about two coaches. Right now Broadus looks like he lost. Brown’s boys spanked the Bearcats, and now there’s a video on the Internet of Broadus shoving Albany’s assistant coach. But it’s bigger than that.

Something about Brown’s words couldn’t sit with Broadus. And it wasn’t Brown’s outpouring of support for a coach that was fired 10 months earlier, it was Brown attacking his players.

“I just wanted to to make sure that he understands that I’m gonna protect my guys and that it was the end,” Broadus said after the game.

It wasn’t a thug move, it was an honorable move. It was against the rules and Broadus paid the price for giving Albany assistant coach Chad O’Donnell an up-close look at his Final Four ring. And feel bad for anyone who was with him in that Long Island hotel room on Saturday.

Sometimes an up-and-in fastball should be a more than an up-and-in fastball. Sometimes a shove should be more than a shove.