The best season of the year is here, and it has absolutely nothing to do with leaf peeping.
The 2007 high school football season opens this week, and there are lots of reasons for fans to be excited. This year's campaign features parity in nearly every league, as well as some potentially interesting local storylines that are likely to have even the most apathetic fans combing the box scores every Saturday and Monday morning.
One of the big things for fans in the upper Pioneer Valley to keep an eye on: how Greenfield reacts to moving from the Suburban to the Intercounty League.
In many ways the move makes a lot of sense. Greenfield is coming off one of its worst seasons ever, and hasn't been all that competitive for a while against the bigger and more talent-laden Springfield-area SL programs. Moving to the Intercounty will give Mike Kuchieski's Green Wave a chance to face a more comparable talent pool, and create some new rivalries against teams in his own backyard.
A similar change was made last year with Greenfield's boys' basketball program, a move that has turned out to be the right one for everyone involved.
It will also be curious to see how Greenfield responds to its somewhat improbable Thanksgiving Day loss to Turners Falls, which is another program that will bear watching this fall. Last season, the Powertown contingent gave new meaning to the term "inconsistent," dominating some games while not even showing up for others. The Indians certainly have the talent to contend for a Super Bowl—the "X" factor will be what they have between their ears when they head into battle.
There are a lot of other questions hanging out there, like how Mike Duprey's fledgling Pioneer Regional program will do in the Tri-County League after playing an independent schedule for the past two seasons. Will Easthampton to able to rebuild after losing a big part of its Super Bowl nucleus to graduation—standout tailback Joe Grimes?
Can Northampton build on the momentum from last year's improbable near-Super Bowl campaign and finally make it to the big dance? Will Frontier's lock on the Intercounty League title be seriously challenged this year, and will Athol once again be the team to knock them off that perch?
Will Joe Gamache's Franklin Tech Eagles finally be rewarded for their years of hard work and good sportsmanship with a few wins? And will this be the year "The Professor" Jim Smith's Mohawk Warriors finally get over, and bring a Super Bowl title home to the West County?
So there are a few reasons for football fans to be pumped up about the next three months, but I'll give you one more. Every day, it seems, we are bombarded with bad news from the sports world. From entitled, money-dripping bad actor-athletes posing as "role models" to doping in cycling, steroids in baseball, and allegations of NFL players engaging in dog-fighting and gun-play at strip clubs, there are a lot of reasons for fans to feel cynical.
That's not the case in high school sports. It's one of the last truly pure athletic venues. Granted, there may be a few boneheaded moments here and there. But there is something cleansing about a spirited contest played by student athletes in the prime of their lives, competing for nothing more than personal and school pride and love of the game.
So you can keep your cider, leaves and pumpkins. Just give me a Friday night under the lights with a capacity crowd, a couple of hot dogs, 100 yards of sod, and two teams engaged in the artful exhibition of controlled violence that is high school football.
That's when I'll know autumn has truly arrived in God's country.
