P.S. I like your footballs.

Went to a high school football game tonight. Or three-quarters of a h.s. football game, actually, my first in almost a year. It is Homecoming weekend in this town, and in my past life as a girl who wrote about sports on an almost-daily basis, I would have been relatively “up” for this kind of thing, but now ... now I spent almost all day not wanting to go to the game, really, except to hang out for a while with my friend Amy, who had an empty seat.

The home team lost. To the hated rival Redbirds from the town 6 miles south of this one. Oh, the humanity!

And suddenly, I am back in The Ville, half an hour or so after the Rams (the h.s. version of the Ramlets!) have just lost their Homecoming game to the rival Panthers from the town 10 miles or so west. It is fall of my senior year of high school (1982-83). Tee-Hee and I are crammed into a truck that belongs to Mike, a boy I actually had “gone with” in 7th grade who, by this time, is not even really what I would call a close friend. Mike is behind the wheel, Tee-Hee is in the middle and I am next to the window, and we are parked on school grounds, over near the junior high (home of the Ramlets!). We pass a can of beer back and forth, though I really am in no mood to drink. I really just want to get home.

“How could we have lost this game?” Mike asks us, his head in his hands, tears in his eyes. “My senior season! My last year of football! How could we let Pana beat us?”

I am as uncertain then as I am at this moment as to what the score was. I have a feeling the game was not even close; seems to me we had a horrible football team my senior year, but as far as I am concerned, we could have been 9-0. I did not care all that much, back then, about the football team.

[Oddly enough, one year later, I will return from college to watch the Homecoming game between The Ville and Hillsboro. And I will witness what I believe to be THE most exciting game I have ever seen, a 3-0 victory (or was it a loss?) by the Rams, in overtime (or was it double- or triple-OT?), and suddenly I will rue all the times that I simply did not pay attention to h.s. football.]

[Even more oddly: To this day, since I attended that game, I have not been back to a h.s. football game, let alone a Homecoming game, in my hometown.]

I have covered 9-plus high school football games each fall for the last ... umpteen years. I have covered countless playoff games for at least half of those seasons. Now, I realize I have no idea when I will see my next game.

Do I remember my first football game? Of course not. I do remember that sometime around that time period, I had a huge crush on an 8th-grade boy named Ron, a boy who had just transfered to our school district, when I was in 7th grade. I also remember that when I was in 8th grade, I and my boyfriend Ronnie (no relation to Ron), a 7th-grader, and my friend Cheri and her boyfriend Doug, also a 7th-grader, used to sneak into the varsity football games every Friday night the Rams had a home game and traipse off to the bushes just north of the field and make out for four quarters.

When I get really nostalgic for my junior high years, I really, really miss those makeout sessions.

: )

When I was in 6th grade, early in the school year, I had never kissed a boy.

Kissing was becoming quite an issue back then, though, and there were a few couples on the “Most Likely to Be Engaged in Premarital Kissing” list ... mostly because a couple of the couples (Darci and Richie, Lisa and Eric ... or maybe the other way around) had been caught kissing during recess. Those 4, along with another couple whose names escape me, were brought in for an impromptu “Kissing Intervention” one day during noon recess.

Somehow, my boyfriend Kenny and I also got roped into the intervention session ... though, at that moment in our lives, we had never even entertained the notion of locking lips, let alone gone through with it. (At least I had not, anyway; who knows about Kenny? I mean, after all, he had been to 4-H camp!)

How did we earn our special intervention invitation?

Well, Kenny and I used to write each other notes. Not “love notes,” per se, just random little letters written on blue-lined college-ruled notebook paper with such details as “Math class is totally boring today!” or “Mrs. C. must be on the rag today!” or something revealing like that (we had different homeroom teachers). I used to fold my notes, occasionally, into what we called “footballs”: little triangular packets, in the style that the American flag is folded.

One time, at the end of one of his letters, Kenny wrote:

“P.S. I like your footballs.”

Just so happens that note got confiscated by one of our teachers, “footballs” was misconstrued as being a reference to “boobies,” and Kenny and I earned our special invite to the intervention.