High school football season ended Saturday night, although the coaches, players and true fans among us chuckle and raise our eyebrows at that statement.

We recognize that the sport doesn’t take a vacation, at least among those who hope to achieve a level of it that exceeds mediocrity. You’d better believe that Thornton, Marshwood, Winslow and Oak Hill all began their 2014 state title journey with players hitting the weight room and coaches hitting the film room immediately following Thanksgiving Dinner 2013.

That’s the reality of it. Basketball, hockey, wrestling, skiing, baseball, lacrosse and track and field fill the seasonal void for most. They help with cross-training, keeping the body and mind in harmony and in peak condition. But minds never wander far from the gridiron, and the work doesn’t cease.

The same is true for those who engage in less strenuous activities, such as setting enrollment cutoff numbers, sorting out schedules and assessing the overall health of the sport. Administrators and member schools from the Maine Principals’ Association, with no shortage of input from those of us in the peanut gallery, collaborate to set that agenda.

It’ll be a busy few months for those good folks. All the work will be heavily scrutinized. Much of it will be thankless.

MPA’s football committee will meet in early December, presumably to draw up and release the first proposal for how Maine high school football will be structured in the next two-year classification cycle of 2015-16.

For the first time since the mid-1980s, that board will convene after having overseen consecutive seasons with four classes. No, it hasn’t been a perfect experiment, but I believe that it was overdue and that it left the starting gate at a nice, steady pace.

The kneejerk reaction is that there are still too many routs, and that will be compounded by the argument that we just watched four state championship games decided by a four-touchdown average margin of victory.

People use whatever sample size suits their position on the matter. The bottom line is that in a sport such as football in an economically divided state such as Maine, you’re not going to have an easy time constructing a perfectly level playing field, no matter what you do.

Right now we see great matchups in the upper half of every division and competitive ones in the bottom half. When teams on either side of that invisible line cross over for a required regular-season meeting, it gets ugly. It happens in every sport at every level. We only notice it with high school football if we are emotionally and professionally invested in it.

As for the one-sided state championship games, I’ll defer to the old boxing bromide that styles make fights. Winslow, Marshwood and Oak Hill, in particular, flaunted offenses that were built for cold-weather football. Combine that with players by the dozen who had starred in previous finals, and it shouldn’t have been hard to see those results coming.

There are two burning issues facing the MPA.

One is how to maintain the integrity of Class D, where shrinking enrollments and the allure of electronic devices and other social activities have done a number on depth. Even some of the stronger schools struggle to attract a number of available bodies that exceeds the team’s average age. It is that division in which even the difference of 50 to 75 extra boys in the student body can have an enormous impact on competitive balance and safety.

The other conundrum, and it’s a closely related one, is what to do about young and struggling programs. Sacopee Valley and Telstar have been stigmatized enough for being persuaded to withdraw from the Campbell Conference and forfeit a playoff game, respectively, because they were overmatched.

And they aren’t alone. A dozen or more schools from all corners of the state are taking one for the team, essentially, participating in a league where they don’t belong for the good of the game. I believe many of them advanced to the varsity level to help create the need for this fourth class, yet what are they getting for their trouble? A fistful of 50-0 and 60-0 losses.

Good for the game, perhaps. Good for the kids, hardly. And with Medomak Valley’s upstart team on the horizon, along with the rise of a Lincoln County cooperative program, internal and external pressure will heighten for those schools to join the party.

I wish there were a more competitive party for them to crash. I’ve called for the return of a developmental league in recent months, perhaps even making it one of the four classes and giving it a Gold Ball to legitimize it. But that proposal is fraught with problems, not the least of which are deciding who gets to join and potentially forcing a bunch of good Class B programs back into the impossible Class A pool they worked so hard to escape.

We all want answers. We all want good competition. The challenge is to concoct all that with limited resources and limited time.

My recommendation in the coming months is to be open-minded, participate in the process when invited, and trust the people in charge to hash it out.

Easy, right? Yup, about as easy as committing to the rigors of next September, this November.

Such is the reality of a season that never really ends.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.

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