By MONTE DUTTON

I can’t move on from football. Football is too great. I love it too much.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. – Ecclesiastes 3:1
Mortals have made seasons overlap.
In Clinton, the stadium is named after the quiet man who lived across the highway. The field is named after my coach. Few high schools hold the long-term allegiance of the one where I went. I’ve never gotten an email with such attachments.
I wore No. 50. My brother wore 10. My daddy wore 33.

That might be the same if I’d grown up in Greenville, but Daddy might have played at Parker, me at Greenville and my brother at J.L. Mann. I can’t overestimate how much generational attachments mean in a little one-team town. In 1972, when the Red Devils won their first state championship since 1939, two played on the latter whose fathers played on the former.
Nowadays it’s not uncommon. The Red Devils have won eight more since, and the current team is still alive with two weeks to go, and there are folks sitting on that cold concrete watching their grandbabies play.

Here’s the difference. It’s not just the high school’s team. It belongs to the town. It has for more than a century. The players and coaches are the great men doing the great deeds, but everyone else is an investor in one form or another.
Half the town shows up. Half the other little towns in District 56 show up. All they want is what they’ve always wanted before and what their daddies and mamas wanted. Win that ballgame tonight.
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead / Who never to himself hath said / This is my own, my native land! / Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d / As home his footsteps he hath turn’d / From wandering on a foreign strand! – Sir Walter Scott

Across the country, maps are dotted with towns like mine. Men and women think of poems they had to recite in classrooms and never forgot. They can’t shake them. I think of one every time two roads diverge in a yellow wood.
I don’t think kids recite poems anymore. Based on my analysis of the current state of writing, they don’t diagram sentences anymore.
I’m at the stage of life where I still sing along with the national anthem and the alma mater because I’m afraid if I don’t, I might forget the words.

Times change. Some things get better, and some get worse, and it’s all a matter of opinion. I don’t fret about the future of a country led by the kids of today. They couldn’t possibly botch things more than my generation, if only we leave them something to save and, more importantly, something to dream.
I might feel differently if I didn’t get to mingle with the kids on the sidelines, snapping photos and scribbling notes, studying them as they interact.

Every Friday night brings with it a new challenge, as God intended. Winning a football game is hard. It’s all a team can do to go 1-0 every week. Games cannot be strung together in advance. Coaches are 99 and 44/100 percent in agreement that games are played one at a time.

Now I’m old, but I still remember what it feels like, looking at the world through the bars of a facemask, my whole body shuddering on the last wind sprint. Now it shudders when I get out of bed.

An old man remembers what it was like to be young, but a young man has no idea what it’s going to be like to be old. Now that I think about it, it’s good the way it is. Being a has-been is better than being a never-was.
The names and numbers change, but it’s like a rolling stone / Go out there, boys, and win one of your own.
I like things that remain the same. There aren’t many. Two of them are the Whiteford’s slaw dogs I inhaled before Friday night’s victory.

I don’t believe in superstition. It’s ridiculous to think me playing a certain song on a guitar 800 miles away from a game I’m watching on TV has anything to do with the outcome of that game. I don’t believe in it, but I am superstitious. It’s a ritual. It’s buying a lottery ticket, even though odds of winning are one in way more people than there are in the country.
Couldn’t hurt.

And the daylight grew heavy with thunder / And the smell of the rain on the wind / Ain’t it just like a human? / Here comes that rainbow again – Kris Kristofferson
Wellpilgrim.com is winding down the fall making a transition to the winter chill. The bounces of the balls are getting truer.

Times are changing. I am aware of how irrelevant what I do for a living has become and thus how unimportant my efforts are. The readers appreciate them, but there aren’t enough of them. I doubt there ever will be again.
It’s what I do. It’s what I know.
Support the advertisers. They are all fine people who want their businesses associated with honest coverage of local sports.
In the off chance you’d like to read my novels and other books, they’re available on Amazon and many prominent bookseller sites.
You can read them on your phones and other devices for a modest cost. I make a bit more if you purchase the actual books, but what I mainly want is for folks to read them.

Longer Songs, a collection of short stories that were based on songs I wrote, was published in 2017. I just read it for the first time since I wrote it, and it was better than I remembered. One of its purposes was to provide a sampler of my fiction. A download is only 99 cents, and the paperback is $7.99. You can’t afford not to read it, not that I’m objective.
Photo galleries are posted on Instagram @furmanatt and @laurenscountysports.
Thanks for putting up with me.