Fall’s high school playoff season is full of excitement, surprises and dramatic weather changes that force sportswriters to maintain larger wardrobes than Kirstie Alley.

It also brings me face-to-face every autumn with the same old philosophical skirmishes that I’m frankly sick of fighting.

This comes as a complete shock to those of you who faithfully peruse my diatribes and suspect that I normally enjoy nothing more than being a rabble-rouser.

Blame it on advancing age or accumulating perspective or plain, old battle fatigue. Each probably applies.

In fact, I recommend that everyone join me in saying the serenity prayer a few extra times. Because when it comes to the turning tide of youth sports activities, accepting what we cannot change is probably the only formula for our continued enjoyment.

Three hot-button issues that have left me opting to cool my heels after years of further review:

1. Private versus public. Sorry, folks. They will continue to meet in the Maine Principals’ Association playoffs for as long as there are such sanctioned activities.

The complaints reverberate from all corners of the state whenever Cheverus, North Yarmouth Academy, St. Dominic, John Bapst, Lee or Bangor Christian is good at anything. Which is, well, almost everything.

I’m just tired of it. Maybe it’s the reality that a vast majority of the state and regional championships awarded across all MPA sports are won by public institutions. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

Or perhaps it’s the tenor of the complaining, because it often devolves into flat-out hate speech toward well-to-do people, or families of a certain religious denomination, or young adults of a different nationality. That part of it makes me ill, and it removes all credibility from the person trying to make the case for a closed tournament.

And it’s a flimsy, self-serving case at best, anyway. I have noticed that almost nobody complains about the Class D Christian schools that don’t win any hardware and barely have enough of an athletic budget to buy a roll of ankle tape.

People get upset when it specifically affects their school in the form of a playoff loss, period. The administrators who are paid to organize these proceedings with detachment do a fine job keeping the playing field as level as it can be, from my vantage point.

2. Artificial turf. Nobody’s against the carpet as a general concept or begrudges the companies that manufacture it from selling the stuff. But boy, oh boy, when it seems to give one of those schools from Maine’s affluent southern corridor a perceived advantage at playoff time, we can’t wring our hands and clear our throats loudly enough.

Of course it is an unfair adjustment for football, soccer or field hockey teams that play on terra firma and slop all season to play an elimination game on turf at season’s end. Life is full of unfair adjustments.

My friendly advice is to get used to it. More and more schools are raising the funds to replace their natural grass with chopped-up truck tires painted green. And the MPA is understandably eager to adopt those sites as locations for regional and state championship games. One-stop shopping for principals, players, parents, fans and officials is an optimum situation.

Plus, this is Maine, where it can be 70 and sunny one October day and 45 and drizzly the next. At this point in the season, almost every multi-use grass field is in a state of disrepair that doesn’t encourage fair or even safe play.

Rather than wait until a day before your playoff assignment to locate the nearest turf field, practice on it and complain afterward, schedule a couple of those field trips during the season itself. Think of it as optimistic pre-planning. Or schedule your preseason play day with one of the lucky turf-holders.

Do something other than spit into the wind, which is all the complaining is good for at this point. Turf and its perceived pluses and minuses are here to stay.

3. Postponing games due to rain. I used to despise this, especially as it pertained to football. It struck me as teaching the softest lesson imaginable within the context of an allegedly hard game.

Playing through the mud puddles, the sideways raindrops and even the snowflakes is still my preference. And I admit it: I root for coaches and athletic directors who switch game times well in advance based solely on a forecast to get burned. But I understand and appreciate the reasons for their choice.

Whether or not it’s a safety issue is debatable. I’ve never bought that one. Football is a brutal game, period, in any weather.

But those multi-use fields we mentioned earlier don’t recover from the punishment of a football game in those conditions. They just don’t. The grass dies and isn’t reborn until mid-May.

The decision to weather a storm and play in a monsoon isn’t the fair one for soccer or field hockey teams that might have to share that field, or for a football squad with aspirations of hosting a playoff game there in a week or two.

Better to take the rain check if you have one at your disposal. Stay dry. Stay healthy.

Live to debate another day.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.