I covered high school football for a weekly newspaper in a valley of five small towns for forty years, from the fall of 1958, when I was twenty-two and the editor handed me a notebook and told me to go find out who won, until the fall of 1998, when I handed the notebook to a young woman who is, I'm pleased to say, better at it than I was. Forty seasons. Something over four hundred Friday nights. I kept the clip books. My wife kept count.

Retirement is fine. But I found this fall that I couldn't just sit in the stands and watch. I kept reaching for a pencil. So my grandson set me up with this page, and here I am, back in the press box in a manner of speaking, with no deadline and nobody to answer to, writing about the only sport I ever really understood.

People who didn't grow up in a small town think it's about football. It's not, exactly. It's about the one night a week when the whole town is in the same place at the same time, looking at the same thing. The bank closes early. The diner puts a sign in the window. The volunteer fire company parks the pumper behind the end zone, in case, and mostly to watch. The old men stand along the fence by the forty because they've stood there since they were boys. The kids run under the bleachers. The band plays the fight song a little too fast. And for two and a half hours, whatever else is going on in the valley (a plant closing, a bad harvest, a fight on the school board) waits.

The boys on the field are somebody's grandson, somebody's paperboy, somebody's kid who mows the cemetery. You know them. You knew their fathers, and in my case, toward the end, I had covered their fathers. That's the thing. In forty years I wrote about three generations of some families. I have a clip from 1961 with a Wendell boy running for two touchdowns, and a clip from 1994 with his grandson doing the same thing on the same field, and the field's had new lights and new bleachers but the same dip at the thirty-yard line that nobody's ever fixed.

The lights. That's the other thing. Out here it gets dark, really dark, and on Friday night from ten miles off you can see the glow over Harlow or Stony Ridge and you know exactly what it is. I've driven toward that glow four hundred times and it never got old.

Harlow won the small-school state championship in November 1971, and nobody from the valley has done it before or since. I get asked about that team more than anything else, and I've told the story enough times that I can tell it short.

They weren't big. They had one lineman over 200 pounds and he was the center. What they had was a quarterback who never got rattled, a fullback who never went down on first contact, a coach who ran the same eleven plays for thirty years and didn't care who knew it, and a defense that was, for one autumn, simply unwilling to be scored on. They gave up 39 points all season. In twelve games.

The title game was played on a neutral field three hours away, in sleet. Half the valley drove down; the diner in Harlow closed for the only Friday in its history. Harlow won 13-7 on a fourth-down quarterback sneak with a minute and a half left, and the sneak was the eleventh play in the book, the one they'd run all year, and everybody in the stadium knew it was coming, and it worked anyway. That's the whole lesson of the 1971 Harlow Hornets, if there is one.

I wrote that story in the car on the way home, on a legal pad, with my wife driving, and phoned it in from a gas station. It ran under a headline that was set in the biggest type the Courier owned. They still have the front page framed in the Harlow gym. My name is on it, spelled wrong, and I've never said a word.

It rained for four days that week, and by Friday afternoon the creek was over its banks and Stony Ridge's field, which sits in the bottom by the creek because that was the flat ground the town had, was under a foot of water. The visitors' bleachers were an island. Common sense said postpone. Stony Ridge was playing Gilman for the conference lead, the next week was the last of the season, and the state wouldn't move the playoff dates, so postponing meant forfeiting.

So the Stony Ridge athletic director called the athletic director at Fairview, whose field was up on the hill and dry, and Fairview said come on up. Two towns' worth of people drove twenty miles in the rain, and at seven-thirty on a Friday night in a driving storm the Stony Ridge Panthers and the Gilman Bulldogs played a football game on a borrowed field with borrowed yard markers and a Fairview kid running the clock, while a good part of Fairview stood along the fence in raincoats, rooting for nobody, just watching.

Gilman won, 6-0, on a blocked punt that a kid fell on in the end zone in mud up to his elbows. The ball was so wet and heavy that nobody completed a pass all night. I don't think either team got a first down in the second half. It was the worst football game I ever saw and one of the best nights, and everybody in the valley who was there will tell you the same thing. Stony Ridge's field was under water for a week. They put in drain tile the next spring, and it hasn't flooded since, and I think some of the old-timers are a little sorry about that.

Five towns, five teams, one conference: Harlow, Stony Ridge, Fairview, Gilman, and Bishop. I've been to a game every Friday. Old habits. Here's the season so far, with the kind of notes I used to keep in the margin of the notebook.

Standings after five weeks: Fairview 4-0, Harlow 2-2, Stony Ridge 2-2, Gilman 2-2, Bishop 0-4. Fairview and Harlow don't play again until the last week of October, and if Harlow wins out until then, that game will decide the valley. Fairview at Harlow, October 29. Circle it. I have.

Coming up, Oct. 1: Bishop at Gilman, Stony Ridge at Fairview, Harlow idle. I'll be at Fairview. The coffee's better.

Forty years of Friday nights and Saturday mornings at the typewriter came down to about a dozen rules. I gave this list to my replacement and I'll give it to you.

1. Get the names right. First, last, spelled the way the family spells it, jersey number checked against the program and then against the coach, because the program is wrong every third week. A kid who scores the only touchdown of his life is going to have that clipping on a refrigerator for sixty years. Don't misspell him. I did it once, in 1960, and I still know the boy's name.
2. Lead with the play, not the score. The score's in the headline. Tell them about the sneak on fourth down, the blocked punt in the mud, the field goal by the kid who'd never seen a football. That's the story. The score is just how it came out.
3. Talk to the losing coach first. He's had a bad night, he's got a bus to catch, and he'll tell you the truth. The winning coach can wait; he's happy to.
4. Write the story the kid's grandmother will cut out. Not the one that makes you look smart. She doesn't care about your prose. She cares that her grandson made a tackle on the kickoff and you saw it.
5. Never call it a war. Not a battle, not a slaughter, not a massacre. It's a game between boys. There were fathers in the stands on Friday nights in 1968 who'd been in a real one, and they didn't need me telling them a football game was the same thing.
6. Count the crowd yourself. The athletic director will tell you two thousand. Count one section, multiply, and it'll be nine hundred. Nine hundred is fine. It's a town of eleven hundred.
7. Sit where you can see the whole field. Not the best seat, the highest one. The press box, when there is one. The top row of the bleachers when there isn't. You can't write the play if you didn't see the block that made it.
8. Write it that night. Not the next morning. By morning you've talked to six people and you've started to write their game instead of the one you saw.
9. Get the band in. One line. They practiced as hard as the team did.
10. Short sentences. Football is short sentences.
11. Don't predict. I predicted Harlow to lose the 1971 title game. In print. In the biggest type the Courier owned.
12. Go back the next Friday. Every one, for as long as they let you. The story of a season is the story of a town, and you can't tell it from home.

A word about the coffee, because it deserves one. Every press box in the valley has a coffee pot, and every one of them is run by somebody's mother, and it is, in every case, made at about four in the afternoon and kept on the burner until the final whistle. By the fourth quarter it has the consistency of road tar and the temperature of the sun. I drank it for forty years. It is, I am convinced, the reason I'm still here.

Rankings, for the record: Fairview's is the best, because the booster club bought a new pot in 1994 and a woman there adds a pinch of salt. Harlow's is the strongest. Gilman's comes in a thermos and the thermos is older than I am. Stony Ridge's is fine now that they moved the pot out of the rain. Bishop doesn't have a press box; the coffee comes up the bleachers in a paper cup, carried by a kid, and it is always, somehow, still hot. That's Bishop.

See you Friday.

— Gus