Quote of the day

By the end of this weekend, we will exist in a tryptophan haze of football, as gorged on the N.F.L. and Alabama-Auburn and Florida-Florida State as on breasts and thighs and drumsticks. More and more, though, I find myself drawn to high school football and its enticing aroma of peanuts and cigar smoke and the earthy smell of a field mowed and lined for autumn.

It is easy to become jaded and cynical about sports after covering it for more than 30 years, as I have. As Richard Ford wrote in his novel “The Sportswriter”: “If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything, you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.”

Since Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, my home state, in August 2005, I have been particularly buoyed by the redemptive aspects of high school football. I followed a school called South Plaquemines High, formed after the storm and situated 40 miles below New Orleans. The students nicknamed themselves the Hurricanes. The players traveled 60 miles roundtrip to practice during the 2006 season, and had no home field or locker room but still made the playoffs. In 2007, the resilient Hurricanes won the state championship for small schools. They also convinced the tiny oil and fishing villages of Plaquemines Parish that if a team could rebuild itself, maybe the county could rebuild itself as well.

It is not that high school football is pure. Far from it. The excesses of recruiting and steroids have trickled down from above along with eye black and end-zone dances. But at the prep level, football exists in an encouraging twilight. It is still a game, not yet a business. It is life lived in the present, players smashing through a banner held by cheerleaders, bursting with the possibility of the moment, not yet circumscribed by the limits and betrayals of the future.

-Jere Longman