Friday night redux

Ran into an old acquaintance a few weeks back while waiting for the tire guys to slap a fresh shoe on my bucket of bolts, and it reminded me that another old acquaintance -- nah, old friend -- was about to re-introduce itself.

The acquaintance was Paul Fluegge, who back in my sportswriting days was the head football coach at Concordia Lutheran High School. Like me, he's retired now, but not entirely; he's still an assistant coach, high school football being that aforementioned old friend who's not willing to let you go.

I told him I knew exactly how he feels. Because retirement or not, high school football season is about the only thing that still has its hooks in me, too.

I bring this up because it all starts up again at the end of the week, when those familiar oases of Friday lights will bloom again. Beneath them cheerleaders will cheer and school bands will strut and young men will block and tackle, and footballs will arc across the illuminated dark toward either sure hands or buttered fingers.

I wrote about this, in pretty much the same words, a year ago this week. So at the risk of repeating myself, here's what I said then in only slightly revised form, because I couldn't write it again any better:

 The weather boys and girls are telling us we could sideswipe the 40s tonight in these parts, and what you can say about that is either summer's over or fall's sneaking in on a fake ID. It is, after all, still August, and that industrial heat we all know and loathe here in Indiana is lingering just off stage, waiting to come back with a vengeance.

What I say is to hell with that noise.

What I say is the schoolbuses are running and the air conditioning's off and fall begins Friday night, because the lights are coming up again. They'll be flanked by cornfields out in the country where you can see 'em for miles, and they'll be beacons among the thousand lights of the cities and 'burbs. And beneath them there'll be glory and heartache and everything else that comes with fall, and with high school football.

A decade out from a 38-year run as a working sportswriter, it's the night, and the season, I miss the most. For the most part I don't miss it at all after ten years, much as I loved it. But when those lights come up and  high school football returns,  I still think I should be in a pressbox somewhere, still think there's some lede I should be writing in my head as Snider or North Side or one of the Bishops, Luers and Dwenger, have at it. 

Or maybe Leo or East Noble or my alma mater, New Haven.

One opening night it was Carroll vs. Snider out at Carroll, and I was sitting in the parking lot knocking out my gamer as I waited for the traffic to clear. Other years it was Bishop Dwenger or Concordia at Zollner, Homestead out in Aboite, or Heritage down by Monroeville and Hoagland -- where one night I was inadvertently locked in the stadium and had to scale an eight-foot fence to get out.

It's not just a job, as the recruiters say. It's an adventure.

Across the decades I  covered games when it was so cold you could literally see the field turning white with frost, and when it was so foggy you couldn't see the far sideline even from the near sideline. Once I covered a playoff game at Eastbrook High School when wind-driven sheets of rain turned 100 yards of pristine grass into a churn of liquid mud within minutes. 

And then there was that opening night, years ago, when the lights came up at Madison Heights High School in Anderson and fall commenced on the hottest day of the year.

It was 95 degrees that night at game time, and a pile of openers in central Indiana were postponed. But the Pirates of Madison Heights forged on, with frequent official timeouts for water breaks. 

Time has erased who won the game or even who Heights was playing; my only memories of  that night are visceral ones. Rivulets of sweat stinging my eyes. Pints of it soaking my shirt. Looking to my right at the local radio announcer -- an Anderson legend named Sam Roberts -- and seeing his shirt unbuttoned to his navel as he barked out the play-by-play.

No offense to Sam, who's been gone almost 20 years. But that was not the prettiest thing I ever saw.

Know what, though?

It was opening night of high school football. It was the first whisper of autumn, nuclear heat or not. It was the lights coming up all over Indiana, and me feeling lucky to see 'em from my privileged spot.

All that begins again Friday night.

Light 'em up, fellas. Light 'em up.