Somehow, they managed it. For the first time since 1975, I had nothing to do with the first weekend of high school football in San Bernardino County, and apparently they played a nearly full schedule.

I was hired by the San Bernardino Sun in August of 1976, and my first football game was Pacific at home against Moreno Valley, not even a month later. Pacific won, and I’m gonna say it was something like 26-20. A guy named Ray Kalinich was the Pacific coach. I want to say a kid named “Terrell” was Pacific’s best player that night, and that “kid” would be pushing 50, today. Yikes.

I imagine at least one person asked me “where is Claude Anderson” once they found out I was from The Sun. “Anderson” being the impossibly old Sun veteran (he was just short of 55, or only slightly older than I am now) who was deemed the dean of San Bernardino County prep sports and the preferred media fixture in every area press box.

For 32 consecutive Septembers, then, I was somehow involved with prep football’s opening weekend. Even when I was the Los Angeles Rams beat writer, 1977-80, and had minimal contact with the high schools beat, I’m sure I would have been there on opening night. It’s just too big a deal for suburban newspapers. An all-hands-on-deck sort of thing.

I imagine I dodged a few other bullets during that 32-year streak, too.

One would be the early years, when I first became sports editor, in 1980. I felt like I needed to be inside. So I didn’t actually see a first weekend game, 1980 and 1981, maybe even 1982, but I most certainly was inside putting the section together on the eternally frantic “prep Friday night.”

Another would be the two Summer Olympics I covered that began late, for weather reasons. Those would be Seoul 1988 and Sydney 2000. But Seoul didn’t begin until Sept. 17, so I certainly was still in Berdoo for Week 1 … and Sydney began Sept. 15, meaning I would have been in SoCal for the Sept. 8 openers.

From 1983 (at the latest) forward, I was at a game every opening night for 25 consecutive seasons.

I often was asked “what is your favorite sport,” and for most of my career I usually said “prep football,” which generally drew quizzical looks. And then I would have to explain: “It’s so genuine and so specific to a community, and the styles are so varied, and people care on a really gut level …”

And when I didn’t say “prep football” I probably would have said “college football” or, maybe, “baseball.” But that was only occasionally.

Weird thing here? I don’t think I missed 2008’s first weekend anymore than it missed me.

I spent Friday night at a friend’s house, having dinner. And even though it had struck me that some of the teams I covered for decades were playing, I don’t think I actually thought about not being at a prep game until very late that night.

And I was thinking about why that might be, and this is what I’ve come up with.

1. I not only don’t work in the IE anymore, I don’t live there. That sense of local-local sports being in the air is missing. Local-local where I am now, in Long Beach, is Poly and Wilson. I am becoming disconnected from the IE scene. A batch of coaches already have changed, etc.

2. The core schools for the San Bernardino Sun market are almost uniformly less important in the grand scheme of CIF-Southern Section competition than they have been in … oh, forever. The county’s top league, the Citrus Belt, which competed at the top level of CIF-SS competition for some 90 years … was knocked down a peg a few years back. Now, the dominant league in the IE is based in Riverside and Corona, an unthinkable concept a decade ago. It’s a group of eight school with a silly name. The Big Eight, maybe?

I was fortunate, however, to work through the glory days of IE football, particularly when it comes to San Bernardino County in general and the Citrus Belt League, in specific. Fontana played for CIF titles in 1976, 1984, 1987 and 1989, and won the “large-schools” title at Anaheim Stadium in 1987 and 1989. Redlands played for it in 1979, Colton did in 1981, and San Gorgonio in 1989, Eisenhower played for it in 1991 and 1993 (winning the latter game, gloriously, 56-3 over Mater Dei).

Meantime, the San Andreas League (Cajon, that is) won a CIF title in 1987, and Bloomington had a great run in the 1990s (CIF titles in 1994, 1996-99) and little Arrowhead Christian won titles in 1996-98, if I recall correctly.

So there was success up and down the competition levels … and that’s pretty much gone now. This or that CBL school (generally Redlands East Valley or Colton, sometimes Redlands) has been competitive, but otherwise … a dozen Riverside County schools are generally better than seven of the eight CBL schools, in a given year, and that has been the case almost this entire decade.

So there’s that: The paper and I went from covering a major prep league in what was considered the backwoods of the Southern Section … to covering scads of mostly mediocre programs in a heavily populated area now at least vaguely acknowledged (by L.A. and O.C. folk) to exist. The buzz pretty much went away a decade ago, and it was reflected in the crowds as well as the final scores.

3. There comes a point when covering prep football … well, it’s hard to bring dignity to the event when you’re old enough to be the coach’s father and the players’ grandfather. If you’re still covering football at all, in your 50s, it probably should be the NFL or colleges. I tried to ignore that, my final years, but I was having more trouble with it. Especially as the coaches I knew left the game, and their young replacements might call me “Mister” or even “Sir.”

I briefly considered going to see one of the Long Beach teams play Friday, but I haven’t been back in my home town long enough yet to really care. Maybe that will change.

Meanwhile, I’m sure things went off perfectly well without me around to watch. Redlands opened its new stadium (and lost, sadly, to Vista Murrieta, a school that didn’t exist a few minutes ago). Pacific, the first IE team I covered, hasn’t won a game since 2005, and lost again. Bloomington was crushed, without Don Markham. Fontana Miller won, Rialto won, Aquinas and Arroyo Valley won …

The point here is, don’t harbor any delusions — I certainly don’t — that you will be missed. Certainly as a journalist, barely as a player and only fractionally as a coach. Ours is not a society given to reminiscing, especially when we’ve got a new and different season playing out in front of … whomever it’s playing out in front of. Not me, that is.