Yes, I know the weather was yucky. When it wasn’t raining, it was humid and sticky outside. But it was the official start of football season.

It could have been hot enough to fry an egg on a frying pan and the ozone alert could have been bright red, but it wouldn’t have dimmed the beauty of the start of football season.

We may technically celebrate the beginning of the new year on Jan. 1, but in my world, the year begins Aug. 1. For boys all over North Carolina, it’s the first official day of high school football practice.

These days, coaches don’t wait for Aug. 1 to get their first look at the kids who will take the field for that first game.

With passing camps and six-on-six leagues in vogue, players and coaches have an unofficial opportunity to get some repetitions in. But the real start of the season was Saturday.

That’s the day all the players turn out — in shorts and helmets only for the first six practices.

And, unlike the NFL and even major college football, high school ball isn’t about the money or the fame — OK, it is cool to be singled out among your peers as a member of the football team.

But the game is why these kids play.

It’s why boys in my generation played.

Terry Jones, my classmate and an East Wake quarterback in the early 80s, when I played, called me up the other day out of the clear blue sky.

We enjoyed a reunion lunch at the Corner Grill then retired to the newspaper library to look through back issues of the Gold Leaf Farmer, which dutifully reported our efforts in 1983.

In our senior year, Terry and I were only 5-5, a paltry record for East Wake in that era.

Terry, who now works for Penske Logistics, quoted scores and recalled games with the memory of an athlete who just walked off the field.

I thought my recall was pretty good, but Terry’s memory was something to behold. He remembered plays and games, scores and players.

Those are the kind of memories high school athletes are beginning to build at East Wake and Knightdale High Schools as they prepare for season openers in just a few weeks time.

It’s hard to imagine that there is such a short window of practice time before the first game begins.

Today’s teams have about the same amount of time teams in my day had to prepare for the start of the season.

But at the time, it seemed like we practiced for a couple months before that first game ever rolled around.

Coach Johnny Sasser and Coach Turk Dedrick filled our two-and-a-half-hour practices with a lot of agility drills and endurance training.

They showed their respect for the region’s agricultural economy by holding practices in the evening so the boys could work in tobacco fields.

I spent too much time running laps around the now-disappeared practice field, thinking about how those city boys at Enloe High School probably finished practice earlier in the morning before it even started getting hot.

Regardless of who practiced when, once the first game rolled around and we buckled up our chinstraps and got a chance to hit somebody from another team, all the grind of the summer practice season became a distant memory.

It was what I had waited for since the end of the previous year. In high school, by the way, a year only lasted about three-and-a-half months— from August 1 until mid-November, when football season came to a close.

So, happy New Year. Welcome to football season. Get your pennants out. Get the rust off your cowbell. Prime the aerosol noisemakers. Warm up the band. Watch the cheerleaders and make sure you plant your rear end in a high school stadium sometime this fall.

The boys on the field may win or lose the game. But they will have won the test of wills that it takes to make it through the month of August, when the real year begins.