The world will little note nor long remember Ponderosa Golf Course. The little course along the Buffalo River near Glyndon, Minn., never hosted a big tournament or made a golf magazine’s top-10 list.

But it served a purpose for 50 years. Ponderosa provided affordable, low-key recreation for customers who wanted to play golf, but didn’t want to deal with the crowded, sometimes high-falutin’ attitudes of the courses in Fargo-Moorhead. If golfers in F-M are drinking craft beers and smoking cigars, golfers at Ponderosa are pounding Keystone Light.

Let’s put it this way: There’s a sign near the first hole at Ponderosa that reads, “No coolers larger than a 12 pack.”

The clock is ticking on Ponderosa. The golf course operates on land owned by the Minnesota State University Moorhead Alumni Foundation. Last month, the foundation voted to not renew the lease to Valley Golf Management, which operates Ponderosa. The lease runs out March 31, at which time the golf course will be DOA.

Last weekend provided a reprieve of sorts for Ponderosa. Because of temperatures in the 60s and 70s, a couple of hundred golfers made their way around the course for “one last round.” There were golfers from 8 to 80 enjoying unseasonably warm temperatures and the gorgeous, wooded setting along the Buffalo River. Good stuff. With the weather forecasts looking much more March-like for the next couple of weeks, it’s likely Ponderosa has seen its last busy day.

That Ponderosa survived until 2015 is something of an upset anyway. The course used to be 18 holes, but that was shaved back to nine when MSUM opened the Regional Science Center in the 1980s amid an ugly public fight. It’s been a battle for survival ever since.

The writing was on the wall since last summer, when MSUM applied for a $527,000 grant from the state of Minnesota based on a 160-acre Science Center project. The issue for the golf course: The grant application included the 30 acres on which the golf course sits.

The future of Ponderosa became a scrap, again, between recreation and education.

Education will win a total victory this time, and those at MSUM can be out of the golf business forever and they can sniff about the mission of the university. They’ve won the battle.

But they’ve lost the war.

Even though Ponderosa will go away quietly and MSUM will be able to generate research revenue in the form of grants – an unspoken mission of universities – the heavy-handed way in which the school handled this is a public-relations defeat.

There was room for compromise here and it wasn’t that difficult to see. State Rep. Paul Marquart asked the parties involved if the study in question could be done on 130 acres instead of 160, allowing the golf course to survive. The answer was “yes.” The university foundation, I’ve been told, turned down purchase offers on the golf course land.

The simple solution would’ve been to allow the golf course to survive – what’s 30 acres? – and turn it into a public-relations victory, especially after Ponderosa’s management brought its case to the public. MSUM president Anne Blackhurst could’ve had a great photo op with some high school golfers from Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton and received some wonderful headlines about fostering goodwill with the surrounding community.

Instead, the locals along Highway 10 who play golf at Ponderosa were left to bad-mouth MSUM this weekend about being the big, bad, cold-hearted bully. When Blackhurst was named president, she talked about having MSUM more involved in the community and doing more positive outreach. This was a missed opportunity.

The death of Ponderosa Golf Course will not matter much to those who don’t golf, and maybe it won’t matter even to those in Fargo-Moorhead who do. The course hosted about 12,000 rounds per year, compared to 30,000 or more at public courses like Edgewood, Village Green, Rose Creek or the Meadows.

But that’s not the point. The point is there was room for compromise and MSUM refused. The school gets a black eye, and deserves it.

(Mike McFeely is a talk-show host on 790 KFGO in Fargo-Moorhead. He can be heard 2-5 p.m. weekdays. Follow him on Twitter @MikeMcFeelyKFGO.)