Gov. John Hickenlooper picked a fine time to get jiggy with his veto pen: on his long stroll out the door.

Friends and sometime allies who got their bills axed at the finish line are angry at the governor, and some are ascribing it to his political ambitions. Politics is the furnace that heats the statehouse, after all.

You could play a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”-type game with political connections, costs and benefits. But I don’t see strategy.

Down South, there’s a game played at summertime social events, the kind that have kegs of beer and a roasted pig. It’s called chicken poop bingo. They draw numbered squares in a pen, add a chicken and wait for it to do its business. People bet on which square that business lands in.

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I see a chicken poop bingo, not a political strategy Hickenlooper might take on the campaign trail as president. No one in Iowa or New Hampshire, or any of the early primary states, care if local governments in Colorado can stop running legal ads in local newspapers, one of the bill Hickenlooper vetoed this year.

Sure, the governor spiked three pot bills. One would have allowed children with autism to qualify for medical marijuana. One would have allowed people to try samples of marijuana in stores. A third would have allowed private out-of-state investors into the state’s cannabis industry.

Pot advocates were plenty mad. They held a press conference on the Capitol steps and briefly threatened to organize a special session, which would set up an election-year fight that neither party needs or should want.

“It’s an outrage to me, considering the time and energy and research and work we did with families,” said state Rep. Edie Hooton, a Democrat from Boulder who sponsored the pot-for-autism bill. “And not once did anyone from the Governor’s Office become engaged at any level.”

Instead, Hickenlooper heard from medical groups that opposed the measure on the grounds there’s not enough research. So along with his veto, he signed an executive order calling for the state health department to research the matter for 18 months, then proceed with rules to allow pot for autism if they don’t find any problems.

That’s a compromise. But Hooton and others said she would try again next session, when a new governor is holding the pen.

Pot activist Mason Tvert threw Hickenlooper’s history as a pub owner back in his face on the Capitol steps to suggest he’s a hypocrite on another intoxicating product.

Really? Then how do they ignore all kinds of other bills he’s signed since voters legalized marijuana in 2012 and his public pushback on a possible Trump administration pushback? They can and probably will, but that would be politics, not reality.

Hickenlooper this year alone signed bills to allow school nurses to administer medical marijuana, and another to allow prescription-level cannabidiol (CBD) oil to be sold in pharmacies once it’s approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

It seems an odd equation. One hundred legislators can pass a bill and one governor can kill it. But it’s the same in every state and it’s true for our nation, because we have three co-equal branches of government, which is why the courts can dictate laws with rulings and interpretations.

Hickenlooper is the veto king this year – he set a personal record with nine – only if he’s competing with himself. He’s wielded the power of the red pen sparingly, compared to other governors. (Last year, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat dealing with a Republican legislature, vetoed 91 bills.)

On the day he held his last public bill signing in his office, Hickenlooper spoke of the moral compass of trying to what’s best for the state and what the right decision is.

“If I was politically concerned I would never veto any marijuana bill, right?” he said. “There are all kind of political opportunities lurking around every corner, but that’s not how we’ve made decisions yet.”

His second-highest veto year was in 2014, as he was running in a tough re-election race, at the end of the only two years of his term in which his party ran both the House and Senate.

In 2011 and 2012, he vetoed one bill each year. In 2013, Hickenlooper didn’t strike down any. He had three in 2015, then two in each of the last couple of years.

Hickenlooper pushed back, as he usually does, at the suggestion he’s feathering his policy nest for a big payoff in a national race someday, which gets us back to chicken poop bingo. There’s no strategy, Hickenlooper swears. Business just falls where it falls, creating winners and losers.