Mendham High School Football Victory Saturday: Minutemen 24, Morris Hills 13

It was a perfect Football Saturday in the Roxiticus Valley...sunny in the mid-60s, colorful leaves on the trees in the hills. Rex, London, Maddie and I had lunch with Grammy at the Denville Fish Market in Denville, New Jersey, then headed back to Mendham for the West Morris Mendham High School football game at home against Morris Hills.

If you came here looking for play-by-play or even an authentic game recap, sorry to disappoint, you've found the Roxiticus Desperate Housewives' perspective on high school football. We arrived during the second quarter, and Mendham was up 3-0. Unfortunately, Morris Hills scored and the Minutemen were close but couldn't get into the endzone at the end of the first half, so we went into halftime down 7-3. The second half was action packed with long runs and touchdowns by both teams and plenty of cheering in the stands, and Mendham scored three more times to win 24-13. They could have scored another TD, but instead opted to let the clock run out.


Let me tell you, it was a terrific -- but very, very strange -- experience for me to attend my first high school football game since I was in high school 25 years ago. When I was in high school, we were organized just like the Brat Pack/Molly Ringwald movies into groups like the brains, the jocks, the cheerleaders, the marching band, the burnouts, etc. Unlike my daughters, I was never cool, pretty, popular... I was a brain, jock, and class clown who got along with most of the groups but didn't really fit in with any of them. When my teenage best friend and I attended football games, we scorned the cheerleaders, wouldn't have noticed that there was a marching band, and pressed ourselves up against the fence wielding giant posters with slogans supporting the players we adored from afar.



All these years later, as a parent attending the game with my non-high-school-aged kids, I was freed of all of those stereotyped divisions and found myself admiring the cheerleaders as they pranced on the sidelines and threw each other high into the air. The marching band, while conservatively dressed in navy and grey instead of the garish orange and black uniforms I remembered from my high school days, felt like a symbol of school spirit as they revved up the crowd with upbeat numbers in the bleachers. And the football players? That part of it hasn't changed much over the years...the team was good looking, strong...and victorious. Instead of pining away like my teenage self, however, I could imagine being in the stands seven years from now, cheering on London's good friend Cody, who at 8 already plays on the local football team and shows every sign of being an impressive high school quarterback.
I'll be sorting through my photos this afternoon and will hope to share a great shot or two from the stands... in the meantime, I'm interested in hearing from my loyal Roxiticus Desperate Housewives readers... do you have high school football memories to share?