First impressions about State Championship Saturday while waiting to thaw out from Regional Rout Weekend:

* The basic premise of the documentary team from Cape Elizabeth was right on the money. Mountain Valley High School football is a slice of Americana right here in our own backyard. I hope the good folks of Rumford, Mexico, Byron and Roxbury truly appreciate what this almost entirely new group of kids has accomplished in 2007.

There’s no question that Coach Jim Aylward enjoyed a run of teams in the 1990s that were better than this one on paper at the start of a season. Without anyone but Cape Elizabeth to push them in their own conference, the Falcons improved with every practice and each game and developed into one of the school’s all-time teams.

Aylward likes to say it’s a credit to his kids and the toughness that’s ingrained as a birthright up in the shadow of the paper mill, and he has a point. I think he leaves out an obvious reason for the program’s perpetual greatness, however.

In an era when the average high school athlete can count on having at least two, maybe even three coaches in any given sport during their four-year career, Aylward is the only head coach ever to occupy the football office at Mountain Valley. Steve LaPointe and Rick White have been his primary assistants, well, forever. That continuity is worth its weight in gold, as in the trophies being added to Mountain Valley’s case at the recent rate of about one per November.

* Six seasons into the single-site, state championship format, one that happened entirely by accident thanks to an early-season snowstorm in 2002, I’ll say without hesitation that it’s the greatest thing to happen in high school football in my lifetime.

Sure, Whitehouse and I both wax poetic about being wide-eyed spectators at the Madison-Lake Region Class C final at Walton Field in Auburn when we were kids who didn’t know each other. And there was a certain charm to watching year after year of state finals on natural grass at Walton, or Keyes Field in Fairfield, or any number of other football equivalents of Bangor Auditorium where the noise is deafening and the fans are encamped directly above the action in claustrophobic glee.

That said, being able to watch all three title games for the price of one $7 ticket (assuming you don’t forget anything in your car) is a high school football fan’s dream. Playing the games on that newfangled, forgiving artificial turf at Fitzpatrick Stadium also takes foul weather and bad footing out of the equation, which is the fairest situation for everybody.

The only thing I’d change in the interest of fairness, if I had $10 million to burn, is build a multi-use, prescription turf field with ample parking in Bangor, Waterville or Augusta to save the Little Ten and Pine Tree Conference teams from getting the long end of the travel stick every year.

* Jack Hersom should win the Fitzpatrick Trophy. I know this is a radical concept in the southern corridor of the state, where Gorham’s Justin Villacci seemingly had his name inscribed on the statue in August. But the Lawrence quarterback is still playing, and his numbers and leadership qualities while on the field basically two-and-a-half quarters in most of his team’s one-sided games are too alluring to ignore.

* We’re not in any danger of becoming Massachusetts anytime soon, but there could be two Thanksgiving Day games in Maine this year. After Gardiner dropped to Class B two years ago, the Gardiner-Cony rivalry joined Portland-Deering in getting special dispensation from the Maine Principals’ Association to play a post-season game without violating the sport season policy. The agreement is to play that game the weekend after the last remaining team (usually Gardiner) is eliminated from the playoffs. And the Tigers, of course, went the distance.

* Speaking of Gardiner, there were traditionalists in Tiger Town who didn’t want any part of the dip to Class B after the 2005 season, even though their enrollment had been beneath that cutoff for years. Think the old-timers might be outnumbered now?

* Being an avowed traditionalist myself, I’ll give Lawrence, Mountain Valley and Foxcroft slight nods next weekend, but I reserve the right to change my mind between now and Friday morning. There doesn’t appear to be a rout in the bunch.