The time has come.

The PIAA should drop the six classifications in high school football and basketball and go back to four divisions.

It doesn’t matter what other states are doing, whether Ohio or Indiana has six, eight, 10 divisions, whatever. Who cares?

Pennsylvania doesn’t need it.

All we have to do is look at the past football season and current basketball campaigns to figure that out.

WPIAL football had nine teams in Class 6A last fall. There were 24 teams in Class 5A and 31 in Class 2A.

Those numbers are just a bit uneven.

The only reason they didn’t take eight 6A teams to the playoffs is because only one team would have missed out. So the second-place team in a nine-team league gets rewarded with a first-round bye.

That’s not much better.

Is there really a lot of satisfaction gained by a team that wins a nine-team league by beating teams in the playoffs it’s already played in the regular season? All the way through?

It’s ridiculous.

In Class 6A girls basketball this season, only eight teams entered the WPIAL playoffs because there were only two sections to draw from. Five of those teams received berths in the state tournament.

That means one of them — Fox Chapel — got to advance to state tourney play without winning a WPIAL playoff game.

Huh?

In girls Class 4A, seven WPIAL teams moved on. That meant Quaker Valley got a state tournament berth despite losing to a team that lost in the semifinals.

The same thing happened in boys Class 3A, where Washington is in the state tournament despite losing by 14 points to Seton LaSalle, which lost in the WPIAL semifinals.

Don’t we have to face the fact that six divisions have made these postseason tournaments too uneven and too watered down?

Look at some of these first-round state basketball tournament match-ups.

Butler is playing Chambersburg. Mars is playing Milton Hershey ... in the first round!

Remember when there was something called a Western Final, when two teams from this side of the state would play each other for the right to face the Eastern Final champ for the state crown?

That concept is long gone because the distribution of teams in various classifications throughout the state simply isn’t even enough.

The six-classification system in the PIAA should be called an experiment that failed.

Go back to four.

We don’t need 12 WPIAL title games in three days at the Petersen Events Center. We don’t need championship games starting after 9 p.m., when most high school regular season games end.

Eight WPIAL title games are plenty. So are four divisions.

John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle