What a kick in the brass!

Three days after Columbia University’s marching band was shut down by tone-deaf administrators, members of the famously irreverent troupe suffered their greatest indignity so far: They’d been replaced at the football season’s first home game Saturday by a high school band from Staten Island.

It was a very fine, talented group of young musicians from the Staten Island Technical High School Marching Band, but still.

“I haven’t felt this demeaned in a while,” said downbeat trombonist Timoteo Cruz, 21, as he sat sidelined with his bandmates and watched his team get clobbered 24-10 by Georgetown University — a school mostly known for its basketball team.

Instead of the Columbia band’s rousing, if slightly off-kilter, rendition of “Roar, Lion, Roar,” the crowd was treated by the new kids on the gridiron to a crisp, “Eye of the Tiger.”

“It does feel like an act of betrayal,” said Cruz, a junior.

The Ivy League school’s band — notorious for its phallic-shaped marching formations and for sometimes cheering on the opposing team — got its marching orders on Wednesday after a disagreement over whether they could remain part of the athletic department resulted in their funding being cut altogether.

“Everyone is really upset,” said spectator and fan Michael P. Moore of Inwood.

“We are thinking about starting a petition. Everyone loves the fact that the band is off the wall,” he said. “It was a beloved institution. When you’ve suffered through the losing football games, the band made it bearable. They were spirited, they were funny. They represented New York. Now, we have a scab band,” he joked.

Still, some 30 Columbia band members stood their ground — by sitting in the stands, singing and chanting and holding posters reading, “Solidarity Forever” and “The most cleverest banned in the world.”

They had only kind words for their replacement band.

“Those high school kids have nothing to do with this,” said Cruz, a political science and jazz major. “They have no idea what’s going on here — a move by the administration to silence the band, and silence tradition, and take the fun out of college, essentially.”

And for sophomore and trumpeter Maria Pondikos, the sound of the brass section from that high school was a blast from the past: she was a recent alumna.

“It’s sad to see that my high school marching band is taking our place,” she noted. “We’re essentially the same as any other spectator now.”