High School Football

With my alma mater in the third round of the playoffs, I’ve been thinking about football games and my memories of football games from high school.  Most (and let’s be honest – the best) of my football memories are from my freshman year of high school before we moved 60 miles to where we live now.  There was a group of 3 of us (sometimes 4 and on rare occasions 5) that went to football games.  The core group was me, Becky, and her boyfriend Kevin.  The 4th member was Pam and the fifth was Kirk.  That year, I missed just two football games – one was pre-season and the other was an hour and a half away.  You see, Becky and Kevin were dating and Kevin (as a freshman) was on the sophomore football team which played on Friday before the Varsity game.  So Becky and I (and sometimes Pam) would go to the sophomore game and then Kevin would join us about 20 minutes into the Varsity game (20 minutes by my watch, not the game clock!).  Pam went with us to a few of the away games and I think Kirk showed up to one of the home games.  I learned a lot about the game of football that year as Becky and I asked Kevin questions.  The Varsity team made the playoffs – an away game about 2 hours away (in a suburb of Chicago).  Although much of the Sophomore team was invited to move up to Varsity for the game, Kevin decided not to and instead paid the $3 to ride the school bus being provided by the school for those fans who wanted to attend the game.  As I recall, the team had been very good…but we still lost 48-8.  But going to those games was so much fun.  After moving, I never found people who wanted to go to each and every game, plus the away games are a lot farther here and are more in the country – not the case where we used to live. 

At this point, I’m not going to the football game on Saturday…We’re headed to see m grandparents on Friday and instead I’ll be watching the Wisconsin-Ohio State football game on the Big 10 Network.