Something I’ve always loved about the high school football regular season: Regardless of how unforgettable or uncompetitive the games are, they mean something.

This season is a rock-solid case in point. The next game I attend that is settled by single digits will be my first. Closest game I’ve watched all autumn — and the only one in which the team that led at halftime didn’t ultimately win big — was Lisbon’s 24-14 comeback at Oak Hill on the opening Saturday.

Rather than delve into an astute statistical analysis or sound off again about the desperate need for a fourth enrollment classification, I will take the road most easily traveled. I blame Whitehouse.

Even in this eight-week run of glorified junior varsity games, running time and kneel downs, however, there is an inner beauty to the issue being decided on the field.

If teams don’t play a pure round-robin schedule, they’re seeing almost everyone in their conference, or at least in their geographic area. It’s set up so that if you win, everything else takes care of itself.

Your team failed to make the playoffs? The scoreboard and the mirror probably will repudiate any of its pet excuses.

Another gigantic deposit in football’s credit column are the head-to-head battles between teams who knew from two-a-days that they were bound for the postseason but are hell-bent on securing home field advantage.

In an otherwise nondescript season such as this one, at least to date, those games are the ones you didn’t want to miss.

The reason Leavitt-Mt. Blue was such an epic confrontation, other than the combatants probably being two of the three best teams in the state regardless of class, was each team’s earnest conviction that it didn’t feel like answering an early weekend wakeup call or boarding a bus to the inevitable rematch.

Same was true of Mountain Valley’s trips to Wells (loss) and Cape Elizabeth (win). Win one, and the Falcons knew they wouldn’t have to leave Chet Bulger Field through at least the regional finals. Win both, and they probably would have been able to subject both of those opponents to four hours worth of round-trip riding and four more hours of the olfactory sensation that is the set of smokestacks across the street.

Home is the heart of high school football. With the exception of the weather-proof, Super Saturday state game arrangement at Fitzpatrick Stadium that we’ve come to know and love, priority one of the regular season is protecting your house in September and October so that you won’t have to leave it in November.

Sadly, the scuttlebutt says at least one league is thinking of radically changing that policy.

There is a proposal on the table in the Pine Tree Conference — at least in its Class B division — to move its championship game to a neutral site beginning next year.

The idea is a throwback to the 1980s, when the PTC ‘A’ division held its title game on someone else’s field. Of course, back then it was considered a state championship. Now it’s essentially a semifinal.

I see two problems, and one of those is twofold.

It punishes the team that earns home field advantage while cheapening the value of the regular season. Leavitt has set the bar to heights unprecedented in the history of its program, earning the No. 1 seed in the Eastern B playoffs four years in a row. Why should the Hornets and their fans then have to drive to Colby College or Hampden Academy to play such a titanic game? Or why should Mt. Blue or Gardiner or Brewer, for that matter, if they rightfully earn a future regular-season title?

It also gives other leagues a bad idea. Football and education are both copycat games. If this new arrangement flies in 2012, you can bet every other conference in the state will adopt the system and move its title game to a central location.

All it does it take football — the game that has supplanted all others as our national spectator pastime, at all levels — and put it in a blender with everything else.

The PTC or SMAA or Campbell Conference or Little Ten football championship means more than any of those glorified exhibition, money-grab games the MVC and KVAC now hold in soccer, field hockey, basketball, baseball, fill in the name of your child’s extracurricular activity here.

It’s a genuine playoff game. Winner goes to states. Loser goes to the weight room and waits for winter sports.

It means something. The road to get there means nearly as much. Let’s keep it that way.

— Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. Anywhere he goes is not a neutral site.