Friday night slights

 They'll play a high school game at Luersfield tonight between the Bishop Luers Knights and Garrett Railroaders, just like there'll be high school football games in Mishawaka and Merrillville and Warsaw and a handful of other places.

It's semistate week in Indiana, see, and the 24 schools who are left will be playing for the chance to play for a state title next week. Moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas will huddle in the cold bleachers and cheer for the best of their progeny's dreams to come true.

Also, Purdue will play Michigan State in a Big Ten football game in East Lansing, Mich.

This will be exactly one week after Purdue's basketball team knocked off No. 2 Alabama in Mackey Arena -- a marquee game that had no business being played on a Friday night in the middle of the Indiana high school football tournament.

So says the Blob, anyway, which tends toward the curmudgeonly but never more so than with this ancient gripe.

To wit: Friday nights should belong to the high schools. The colleges need to butt out.

Now, I know this is not a new phenomenon, college football and basketball on Friday nights. But that doesn't make it any less wrong. Especially in basketball, but increasingly in football, too, the colleges already play every other day of the week. They've gotta have Friday night, too?

No, they don't, the greedy bastids. No, they don't.

Look. I get how threadbare an argument this is, because a college game on a Friday night isn't going to keep anyone away from a high school game. There's almost literally no crossover. No one who tuned in Purdue-Alabama last week was going to a high school football game anyway; nor are any of those moms and pops and aunties and uncles venturing out to Luersfield tonight going to miss Purdue-Michigan State football, 'cause they likely wouldn't have watched it even if they'd stayed home.

But it's the principle of the thing, see. It's the optics, as people like to say, of the colleges horning in on the one night a week that should belong to the high schools, when they already have six other nights to choose from.

I covered a pile of college football and basketball in my almost 40 years as a working sportswriter, and a bunch of  Super Bowls and Final Fours and big-deal motorsports events, besides. But high school Friday nights always held a special place in my grubby scribe's heart. In fact I might have more scrapbook memories from those nights in Anderson's fabled Wigwam, or on football fields in Berne or Kendallville or Monroeville or Fort Wayne, than I do from what might be termed "the big stuff."

So, yeah. Friday nights are kinda sacrosanct to me. And so go ahead and call me an old man shouting at clouds if you like, because that's exactly what I am on this subject.

Dadgum it.