If you asked most Wisconsinites to identify their favorite sport, the answer probably would be the activity that in its high school iteration starts across the state tonight.

For more than 20 years, I have been announcing high school and college football, first on radio, and now on cable TV in Ripon. I’ve been watching football for far l0nger than that. My first sports memory is watching my father swear at our TV as the Green Bay Packers transitioned from the Glory Years to, well, the Gory Years, the 31-year-long desert between Super Bowl appearances. (My father insisted on putting a blanket over our south-facing living room window so he could clearly see the Packers’ descent from Super Bowl glory past mediocrity.)

The Packers were so bad in my early childhood, in fact, that I have this emblazoned memory: One day in third grade, I picked up a sports legends book from the grade school library. (I noticed two things: Milwaukee Bucks center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wasn’t in it, but there was a basketball player named Lew Alcindor who looked exactly like Abdul-Jabbar, and although boxer Muhammad Ali wasn’t in it either, a boxer named Cassius Clay looked just like him too.) And I got to reading about the Packers’ winning the first two Super Bowls, which happened when I was 1½ and 2½ years old. And my eight-year-old mind could not process the fact that the same team my father swore at every fall Sunday had won the first two Super Bowls, even though the Glory Days were in their twilight.

Around that time, I started attending one UW football game a year, thanks to the fact that my parents and grandfather were season ticket holders. I know people who actually prefer watching football on  TV because you get a better view from the multiple replays. To me, though, football is about the entire experience — the marching bands (such as, well, you know), the brisk (or worse) weather, the feeling of fan involvement by being there that is just not the same on TV.

I certainly did not get my affinity for football by playing the game. With apologies to my high school classmates who played on those teams, the fact is that La Follette won, in order,  three, one, one and four games my four years there. I did not see La Follette win a football game until my senior year,  despite the fact that I was at every home game, sitting in the La Follette Marching Band for the last three of those years. The football I played was of the touch or flag variety, where my lack of athletic skills were tolerated.

At the time I, a 6–2 160-pound stick, didn’t get the reason to get my brains beat out (or so I thought, until I got to the UW Marching Band practice field, where I learned that their practices were more strenuous than high school football’s) to sit on the bench during games. And once I started to understand the game more, I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to push around the guy in front of me — or, more likely, get pushed around by the guy in front of me — so that the guy with the ball might gain two or three yards. (Games with little passing and unsuccessful running are to me boring to watch, though running teams are easier to announce.) I didn’t get the positives of athletics (such as getting together in a group effort, the realization of the group as being more important than the individual, and the importance of doing well just because of the importance of doing well instead for recognition) from athletics; I got them from band.

And I didn’t get my affinity for football from the great successes of the Badgers and Packers either. The Badgers were not as bad as they would become in the Don Mor(t)on Veer from Victory Era of 1987–1989 (as in six wins in three seasons). But in the 1970s, the Badgers had exactly two winning seasons — 7–4 in 1974 and a 5–4–2 in 1978. The Packers also had two winning seasons — 10–4 in their NFC Central championship season in 1972, and 8–7–1 in 1978.

The Badgers finally started getting respectable in 1981, which began with a 21–14 win over number one ranked Michigan. The stunning nature of that win cannot be replicated in print here. The Badgers also beat, at home, archrivals Ohio State and Purdue on the way to a bowl berth. The next few years were pretty good too, including my one and only bowl trip, to the 1984 Hall of Fame Bowl as a member of the UW Marching Band. And then UW coach Dave McClain died of a heart attack two days after the annual spring game. McClain’s interim replacement was not retained after his one season, and then, well, six wins in three seasons (including a growing number of games where a growing number of fans dressed as empty bleachers) speaks for itself.

The Packers, meanwhile, hovered around .500 for the early ’80s, and then Forrest Gregg replaced Bart Starr as coach and decided to blow up Starr’s work (such as it was) and start over with players who were worse both on and off the field. The Packers had one playoff year (1982) and two near-playoff years (1983, when the team set a record for scoring offense and were still outscored on the season, and 1989, when 10 of their 16 games were decided by a touchdown or less), but that was it.

This was about the time that I started announcing games after graduating. The first game was on a beautiful Friday afternoon in 1988, Cuba City’s Homecoming against Lancaster. Announcing was a challenge because, independent of the fact that I had never announced football before that, the Cuba City press box faced the wrong direction, into the sun, and was closer to the goal line than the 50-yard line. Both facts proved a problem during the overtime, when, of course, the action was on the opposite end of the field.

You may have noticed by now a certain parallelism between Badger football and Packer football fortunes. The Packers started getting good when general manager Ron Wolf and head coach Mike Holmgren arrived in 1992. The Badgers, meanwhile, hired Barry Alvarez, and, wonder of wonders, not only got to the Rose Bowl, but won it on New Year’s Day 1994. Three years later, the Packers won Super Bowl XXXI.

I truly believe Badger and Packer fans of today do not realize how good they have it today. This past season, the Badgers got to the Rose Bowl (and losing the Rose Bowl is better than not getting there), and the Packers became the first NFC team to win a Super Bowl despite playing every playoff game on the road.

Meanwhile, back on Friday nights, I started announcing Ripon games in the fall of 2003. This was a good year to start announcing Ripon games, because if I announce games for another 46 years the 2003 Tigers will still be the most dominant offensive juggernaut I’ll probably ever see. The Tigers scored more than 40 points in 12 of their 14 games and more than 50 points in five of their games. They had a 2,000-yard rusher, and their quarterback rushed for more than 1,000 yards and passed for more than 1,000 yards. They won their second game of the season 56–36 with both their longest pass (82 yards) and longest run (92 yards) in program history. They won their second playoff game 56–42.

The game I remember the most from that year was their next-to-last regular season game against archrival Berlin. (Ripon vs. Berlin is the longest running rivalry in Wisconsin high school football.) Ripon was averaging more than 50 points per game, while Berlin was giving up just 5 points per game. Both teams were undefeated, and the winner was going to clinch a share of the conference title.

Besides the score — Ripon 49, Berlin 0 — one other fact stands out: Ripon got 567 yards of offense, all on the ground.

Gold trophy number two came two seasons later, with a much more defense-dominated team that also played closer games. (Well, except for their first playoff game, won 63–6.) The 2005 Tigers gutted out wins over their archrivals to win their third consecutive conference title, but fans accustomed to seeing the Tigers maul their opponents were a bit skeptical of what this team could do once the postseason started.

The highlight was their next to last game, their state semifinal against Lodi. Ripon scored the first two touchdowns, then Lodi scored the next two. Ripon held Lodi on a big fourth-down play, and then Lodi held Ripon on a big fourth-and-goal play. The Blue Devils had the ball deep in their own end with about 2 minutes left to play, which you would think would be a bad time to fumble.

And then the fun began. Lodi did indeed fumble and Ripon recovered, scoring the game-winning touchdown three plays later. The ensuing kickoff, into a 30-mph south wind, looked like a dying duck and spun out of bounds. Instead of taking the ball at the 35-yard line, the Lodi coach decided to make Ripon rekick. The next kick went up in the air, looked as if it hit something in the air, and came down behind a Ripon player, who decided that now would be a good time to fall on the ball. So Lodi’s comeback attempt turned out to consist of one play at the very end, and Ripon won on the way to its second state title in three years.

Ripon has made the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons, which is difficult even in these days when most teams make the playoffs. (When I was in high school, only conference champions got in the playoffs, then two teams per conference, and now all teams with winning conference records and most teams with .500 conference records get in.) Besides their success, though, what makes covering Ripon football enjoyable is that the Tigers are a program their community can be proud of for reasons besides their record. The coaches have collected several letters over the years from game officials complimenting them for their on-field sportsmanship. Watch a Tiger game, and you’ll see Tigers picking up their opponents after plays. In a decade of watching them I have yet to see Ripon coaches publicly reaming out their players for something they did on the field, and I cannot say that about other programs I’ve witnessed.

So what is it about football? (“It” includes the fact that of all the sports played by men, football seems to have the most following among women, even though almost no women — almost — play football.) I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there is just one football game per week, and nine (high school), 11 or 12 (college) or 16 (NFL) games in the regular season. There is considerably less margin for error in a football season. Football also undoubtedly has parallels to ground wars in that one side is trying to take territory from the other by ground or air, and the most important battles are won or lost on the road. And in high school, players are not playing for money or for their athletic scholarship benefits (though they may be playing to try to get a college scholarship).

The breakdown sequence at the end of Ripon High School practices goes like this (each line except the last repeated twice):

We are … Ripon!
We are … the best!
We believe in … our team!
We believe in … each other!
We believe in … hard work!
WE WANT SOME MORE!

If a calamity occurred and I was installed as the head coach of a high school football team, other than adopting Ripon’s offense (since I’ve been around them, they have never failed to average at least 200 rushing yards per game), every week I would tell the players something probably similar to this: You get one chance to play this game today. Once tonight’s game is over, you can never play it again. And there are only nine chances to play high school football, every season. So make this one count.