From 1976 through 2007, I was all over high school football. Because I needed to be. And because I wanted to be.

I’m going to guestimate that I saw more than 300 high school football games during my days running (or working for) the sports department of the San Bernardino Sun. Maybe 400. Lots and lots of games.

I reported on prep football games more often than any sport, aside from major league baseball. (And MLB teams play 162 games in a single year; high schools play no more than 14 games over three-plus months, and as few as nine games, back in the 1970s.)

High school football has been a newspaper staple for nearly a century, and it was particularly significant in our core market, which was characterized by numerous medium-sized, self-contained communities, highly self-aware and prone to look at the local high school as an expression of civic pride. Fontana, Redlands, Colton, Rialto, Barstow, Victorville … the local high school football team was a very big deal, and it was incumbent on the local newspaper to cover the sport thoroughly and in depth.

So it was my job to cover it, and I was lucky that I came to love it.

High school coverage typically is considered an entry-level sort of sports journalism job. Maybe not so much now, now that newspapers are scrambling to be as local-local as they can manage. But for most of my career, preps was something you covered for a time and then got out of … to something more glamorous. And that would include copy-editing.

I felt that way when I started out, as a professional journalist — this high school thing is for someone else — and I was quite content to let others cover the Friday-night-lights stuff, once I took over coverage of the Los Angeles Rams, in 1977. For the next 4-5 years, I didn’t cover a game every week, as most everyone does at any paper that isn’t a major metro. I was on the road with the Rams, or then putting out the section as editor.

Things changed in 1982. Probably because I had been in the community long enough to have a sense of its schools and rivalries and history. Maybe because I realized that our veteran prep sports reporter was better-known than anyone on our staff, and it wasn’t close, and I grasped that the real connection with readers was through the high schools.

Instead of staying inside throughout a Friday night to make sure our coverage turned out the way we liked it … I began to sneak out for a few hours to cover a game close to the office. My theory being I could go see, say, Pacific or San Bernardino high schools, rush back to the office, bang out a quick gamer, then be ready to jump into the editing fray.

(And anyone who ever has worked in sports at an American paper of 150,000 circulation or less can tell you that a prep football Friday night is like nothing else in journalism. Total chaos, crushing deadline pressure, one long adrenaline high and a feeling of sublime achievement if the package turns out semi-well.)

After that, I got into prep football more and more. Even though we had a department that traveled with the Dodgers, Angels, Rams, Raiders, UCLA and USC. I not only covered a game every Friday, I sometimes picked up another on Thursday night (normally an “off” day for me) or Saturday afternoon up at Big Bear, in the mountains.

I eventually volunteered myself to do prep preview “capsules” which often were 15-inch previews of games (though we ran them in 7.5-point type, to conserve space). When I was particularly crazed, I might do 7-8 of them each week, sometimes zoning them to get them all in — again, on Thursday, in theory my day off. I would make a point of getting individual stats in there, and making sure we had the names of 5-6 linemen from each team in the capsule. And quotes from both coaches.

On Friday, I would cover a game, and we had a lot of big ones because the San Bernardino County half of the Inland Empire was building up to its zenith as a prep football hotbed. And then Saturday, or Sunday, I would do, like, 40 inches (really) of something I called the “prep football follow-up” that recapped some key events from the previous Friday night and projected ahead to upcoming games. That involved calling maybe a dozen coaches.

Basically, I was a prep football maniac who happened to be sports editor — and could indulge an urge to cover everything pertaining to the sport. And over a stretch of, oh, 20 years, I probably knew half the starting lineups of 25 schools in our core market. Every year. And never went anywhere without my list of home phones, cell phones and school phones for every coach in San Bernardino County.

It was great fun. High school football always has been the most interesting expression of the sport. The kids are into it, but they don’t expect money and they aren’t on scholarship. Teams tend to have highly distinctive styles, and many have long-serving coaches with known predilections and quirky approaches and extremely high profiles in their communities. To name a few: Dick Bruich, Tom Hoak, Don Markham, Jim Walker, Chuck Pettersen, Jim Taylor, John Tyree, Dan Hook, Paul Branum …

So there was that reinforcement, too, of feedback coming in from the community. Readers could find out about the Dodgers in lots of ways. But they depended on the local newspaper to explain to them how Redlands had lost to Fontana, again.

Eventually, we had significant prep football coverage in the paper every day of the week, including comprehensive stat packages and box scores that included every kid who carried the football even once or threw it or caught it.

The high point of the whole experience probably was in Week 9 of the 1991 season, when nationally top-ranked Rialto Eisenhower played arch-rival Fontana in a televised day game. We had a half-dozen reporters at the game, and we generated at least 15 slugs for the Sunday paper — including 10 by me. Yes, you saw that right. Ten bylines. By me. Someone should have stopped me.

But there is a sort of trap door to prep football. It is really difficult to commit yourself to it when you don’t feel invested in the community you live and work in.

I arrived in the IE from Long Beach, and during the early years I just didn’t care much about the high schools around me. Newcomers always feel that way. Nothing seems more tedious than “someone else’s” high schools.

And now … I’m back into that mode of thought.

I live again in Long Beach, which long ago ceased to be familiar to me in that on-the-ground level. I have no close relative playing high school football. And I’m away from the schools I covered for three decades, steadily losing any sense of connection with any of them. It’s almost sad, feeling my interest ebb away …but there you are.

So, anyway, I decided to go see a high school game on Friday. Not to cover it. Just to see it. See what was going on. It involved Huntington Beach High School playing J. Serra of Rancho Santa Margarita, and the son of a friend of mine was starting at running back in a spread offense that HBHS runs.

We watched for three quarters, and it was fine. But aside from pulling for my friend’s son … I had nothing invested in it. No amateur emotion, no professional obligation to readers …and when I was able to leave after three quarters — without having kept stats, mind you — I realized that I may not see many more prep football games. Like, ever. Even if I live to be 70.

That is no tragedy. The game goes on without me. No problem. Not for me, and not for the schools I no longer cover.

It’s just one of those life experiences … looking back and knowing, intellectually, that This Something once mattered to me, intensely … and now it matters so little that I often don’t notice that it doesn’t matter anymore.