Bowl games are hokey, risky and laborious. They’re a participation trophy for any team with six wins.

They used to offer a week of sun and fun, but now a team can wind up in Boise, Charlotte, Detroit and Mobile. You go because the coaches can reap more practices and, in most cases, a nice bonus check. No wonder so many seniors are fleeing to safer ground.

All of that is true unless you have played three years of college football without a bowl, like Bo Calvert, Martell Irby and the UCLA Bruins.

They play North Carolina State in the Holiday Bowl Dec. 28. They’ll use Petco Park, and they’ll be close enough for their families to gather. They’ll enjoy the forced hospitality. They’ll hang out. It’s a cookie. How it tastes depends on how starved you are. And bowl games are generally won by the team that’s happiest to be there.

“I’d go home after the season and turn on the TV, maybe watch ESPN for fun,” Calvert said. “Then I’d say, dang, there’s another bowl game on. Maybe I’d watch a few of them. Then I’d leave, maybe go on a hike. The guys would text each other, tell each other that we should have been playing in one of those.

“Now we’re on campus during Christmas break, grinding it out with nobody else around. You think about the little things. It’s a chance to show what we’ve been doing.”

UCLA was 4-4 and is now 8-4. The elevator doors in the Ackerman Union are decorated with the USC and UCLA logos, with a large “62-33.” The Bruins also beat LSU. As the season progressed they settled into a reliable consistency.

Losses to Arizona State and Utah kept them out of a Rose Bowl and their first Pac-12 title since 1998, but as Calvert said, the woulda-shoulda world “is a tough space to live in.” The happiness quotient was high and will rise significantly with a bowl win.

UCLA could do something similar in 2022 with eight home games, a non-conference schedule of Bowling Green, Alabama State and South Alabama, and UCF transfer Dillon Gabriel joining the quarterback room.

But 2021 came none too soon for Chip Kelly, the first UCLA coach since Bill Barnes in 1962-64 to suffer three consecutive losing seasons.

Give Kelly credit for his spin moves. He came to UCLA like a FEMA director, asking for time to clean up this horrendous mess that featured linebacker Krys Barnes, returner/receiver Demetric Felton, running back Joshua Kelley, cornerback Quentin Lake, tight end Caleb Wilson and linebacker Osa Odighizuwa. Experience and depth might have been problems but talent wasn’t.

Try such wolf-crying at USC and you’d get laughed onto the 110. But Bruin fans bought it.

Kelly’s first three teams were 10-21. This was the fourth year of his five-year, $23 million deal, which seemed like Google money at the time. Now an extension for Kelly becomes complicated, particularly at today’s prices.

From the inside, linebacker Calvert and defensive back Irby kept chopping wood.

Football teams sometimes improve on shivery practice fields when the standard time curtain comes down, when nobody’s watching. The Bruins just had trouble boxing up that improvement and taking it to the Rose Bowl.

“You cling to those small improvements,” Calvert said. “They help you stay motivated. Foot placement, hand placement, things you critique on film. A guy takes 50 reps to get it, another guy might take 100, another 300. They all improve in their own way. That’s why a guy gets so excited when he makes a sack. He knows everything that’s gone into it.”

“The opportunities were right there in front of us,” Irby said. “A bowl game like that wasn’t the only goal. I think next year’s team can do even better. It’s a matter of correcting the little things.”

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Irby, a redshirt junior, is headed for graduate school. He will study transformative culture and hopes for some time to play the saxophone again. Calvert, a senior, persevered through concussions and depression early in his career, and led the ‘21 Bruins with four sacks.

No one should condemn an NFL-bound player for skipping a bowl game, even though if he really was leery of injury, he should opt for pickleball.

But everyone should applaud the star who wants to go out sweating, hitting and maybe bleeding with his guys.

“In today’s world everybody wants instant gratification, to get it done in one year,” Calvert said. “I look back at the frustrations and I’m thankful for them.

“Now we get a chance to be together again and hug it out. One last game.”