Among the melancholy — yet not actually dire — events that can befall a person, as the decades pass:

1. Your high school closes. Or, in my case, all but disappears. Los Angeles Lutheran first moved from the edge of Inglewood to Burbank, and then to Sylmar, where it nearly disappeared and now apparently has been re-branded as Concordia High School. And they are now the Cougars, instead of Lions. No going home there.

2. Your college/university gives up football.

I am thinking more of the latter than the former, as the college football season arrives, and I spend time, even in Abu Dhabi, watching someone else’s alma mater(s), on television.

Long Beach State had a decent football program, until it was killed 20 years ago, ostensibly for financial reasons.

But the story behind the end of Long Beach State football has a bit more nuance than that. It centers around a great unknown: “If George Allen had lived …”

I went over much of this — the death of the football program — in an entry last fall, when Long Beach State beat a top-10 team in basketball for the first time in a long while.

To crib from myself, noting that the football team was eliminated after the 1991 season:

“A story that has grown up around Long Beach State football, and is now accepted as fact (true or not): In 1990, George Allen (yes, that George Allen, the NFL Hall of Famer, former Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins coach) had taken over the LBSU program. The 49ers started 0-5 but finished 6-0, and it looked as if Allen were in the process of turning around the program.

“His team celebrated their 6-5 finish by dumping a bucket of water/Gatorade/sports drink on him, which was probably not a good idea — he was 72, and the late-season temperatures were in the 50s — and he caught pneumonia and died of a heart attack a month later.

“The program was killed after one more season. It has been accepted wisdom in Long Beach, ever since, that had Allen lived the program would have survived several more years, at the least. (San Jose State still plays football; why not Long Beach?)”

So, yes. Melancholy times.

Sacramento State has football. Cal Poly has football. UC Davis has football. So do New Mexico State and Weber State. And none of those schools are sitting in the middle of one of the great football-recruiting areas in the nation, as Long Beach State is.

So, I was watching South Carolina and Vanderbilt, sorta, last night, the leading edge of a season that tomorrow will continue with Penn State and Ohio, and Nebraska and Southern Mississippi, and Alabama and Michigan, etc., shown here on ESPN America.

And another season commences of looking at football teams from schools I did not attend, and wondering what it would feel like to be an aging alum, watching your team play.

I sometimes wear a brown-and-gold (Long Beach State colors) cap with the linked letters “LB” on it, and not even the Americans here in the UAE know what it stands for.

Maybe if Long Beach State had a football team, it might help with national and international recognition. Or not.

Pretty sure, though, that it couldn’t hurt.

My team is gone. Had George Allen coached another five years, maybe a real stadium would have been built and I’d have a roster to look over all these years later.

It is not tragic. Not even. But it is melancholy. Yes, it is.

“Go (someone else’s) team!”