This Week's Games (continued Saturday)

Well, way down in Bowling Green, I imagine there's all kinds of commotion around the Christmas parade. It starts at 9:30, so about now there's probably a lot of lining up, adjusting uniforms, cramming details, arguing over rules and negotiating parking going on.

Given that Bowling Green is venue, too, for this weekend's 2011 Russell Athletic/KHSAA Commonwealth Gridiron Bowl, it would be so cool if every high-school football team in the state was featured in the Christmas parade. Each float could depict a great victory in the program's history, and players, cheerleaders and statisticians could ride along and wave and pass out candy. (Or not pass out candy, I forget where the Bowling Green parade comes down on that question.) Kentucky's Mr. Football for the season could ride on the caboose float, along with Santa Claus, and each school's marching band and/or choir could immediately precede its team's float and do its fight song and one Christmas carol. (My vote for Heath's band would be "Good Christian Men, Rejoice!")

This would be excellent.

Life, more life, indeed.

Here are today's games.

Class 3A: Louisville Central (11-3) vs. Belfry (13-1), 11 a.m. Saturday

In retrospect, I really should've sent Trinity down U.S. 31-E yesterday, given that school is on the east side of Louisville. Anyway, U.S. 31-W (Tour 7 in 1939's Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State, repackaged in 1996 as The WPA Guide to Kentucky) is definitely the route for Central to have taken to Bowling Green. I have these two dear friends from WKU who married each other. When they started dating, he lived in Lexington, and she lived in Bowling Green. When they got married, they got a dog and a couple of cats, which they named for some Hart County towns (cat Bonnie for Bonnieville, cat Sonora for Sonora and dog Munford for Munfordville) about midway along their old Lexington-to-Bowling Green-or-back love treks. I don't think I ever gave them enough credit for how totally fantastic that was. Incidentally, those two friends ended up having a couple of kids, but they them Emery and Meg (fine names but not nearly as cool).

Belfry doesn't even turn up in the WPA guide. It is out there, man! Google Maps would have those Pirates go all the way up to Lexington and then over to Bowling Green on the parkways and I-65 and says that huge arc saves an hour against the 6-hour, 15-minute trip across Ky. 80.

Class 4A: Franklin-Simpson (13-1) vs. Fort Thomas Highlands (14-0), 3 p.m. Saturday

Franklin is the next town down U.S. 31-W from Bowling Green in the WPA guide's Tour 7. "The people in this remote hilly region have songs, superstitions, and customs that belong to eighteenth-century England," it reads. "Children are admonished never to pluck mistletoe from an oak. Though it is believed to attach itself naturally to any other tree, it is supposed to be held in place on an oak by the druids, and to break their hold would bring calamity upon the 'hull relation.' An expression often heard here, 'as thick as fiddlers in hell,' undoubtedly sprang from the mouths of early reformers."

From Fort Thomas, you could get yourself over to Warsaw and then start taking Tour 5 (Ky. 35) down through the middle of the state, eventually cutting west to Bowling Green from Russell Springs. When I first started doing my every-county tours of the state in the early '90s, that center swatch of the state was the area that most flipped my lid, and I would have to say this drive would be the one I would be most interested in doing this weekend. I remember that a lot of the towns along this route--Harrodsburg, Danville, maybe Liberty--turned up in that great travel-guide to central Kentucky that Matthew/Rube did several months ago that I now cannot seem to locate.

Class 5A: Anderson County (12-2) vs. Bowling Green (14-0), 7 p.m. Saturday

Not enough of this John Herndon column appears before The Anderson News paywall for me to see what driving directions he gives to his Lawrenceburg readers, but I'm quite certain they don't match my mostly U.S. 62/Tour 14 advice. This guy is too busy for that jive. @ANewsJPHerndon, 16 hours ago: "Am at ACHS for girls basketball, Anderson vs Lex Catholic. Should be one of the better matchups in state tonight." And three hours before that: "Feels kind of odd to be covering basketball tonight and football tomorrow. New territory for me. #notcomplaining." I don't know the guy at all, but, as I've said before, this guy is one of my absolute favorite sportswriters ever. His joy for his work just radiates off everything he puts out, and that's what I'm looking for when I go to read sports.

And, finally, we get to the home-ish Purples. I have nothing but love for this 3.3 miles and eight minutes across Bowling Green between the high school and Smith Stadium. I lived in Bowling Green mostly from summer 1986 through spring 1994, and it certainly wouldn't break my heart to live there again. It's a fine town. Once you make that left turn onto Scottsville Road from the high school, there's an old Schnuck's grocery on the right that I noticed had become a big gym when we were in town for Thanksgiving at my sister and brother-in-law's house. Then you get a quarter-mile or so of big, stately homes on sprawling grounds of ancient trees, and their owners probably still can't believe the bad luck that the farmers on the southern end of their street were the ones who sold out to the mall developers and precipitated all the traffic. The hard left onto U.S. 31-W from U.S. 231 puts you on what is (was?) locally referred to as "the bypass" (the question there because other bypasses have been opened since 1994). When Mom and Dad left behind me and my burnt-orange, 1981 Buick Skylark in Bowling Green in August 1986, it was the bright density of commerce along the bypass that made me feel as though I had arrived somewhere so much more electric and cosmopolitan than old-home Paducah. Now the names of those businesses that I first saw in Bowling Green--Murray's, Judy's Castle, Taco Tico, Arnold's Fried Chicken, Rax, the Holiday Inn "Holidome"--seem so quaint. Finally, there's a right turn onto University Drive and onward to WKU. The school has exploded since I left. It still gets me every time that I drive through and see that all the old green space down around Pearce-Ford Tower has been assumed by additional dorms, that many of the roads around and through campus have been reconfigured to better manage traffic flow and that they've added another side of stands to Smith Stadium.

It's just a whole new place, and over the course of today it'll give life to whole bunch of new memories for other folks.

Life! More life! Yes.