Man, I must be old.

I did turn 64 Friday, though I don’t feel that old.

But seeing the way high school football is played now, compared to when I was in high school? In that sense, I feel ancient.

I was a kid in the “three yards and a cloud of dust” era. Sometimes it was mud. The only artificial turf anywhere around was at Three Rivers Stadium.

Anything from 3rd-and-5 and closer, high school teams rarely threw the ball. Even on 3rd-and-long, passes were conservative, a little dump-off screen, something like that.

Most high school games were completed in a little over two hours. Combined passes thrown in a game were 10 or 12.

Not anymore.

Never was that more evident than last weekend.

Mac Schnur threw 46 passes for Butler, good for 305 yards and two touchdowns. Jason Siket threw for 217 yards and five touchdowns for North Catholic.

And those two guys were backup quarterbacks entering last weekend.

Schnur saw action at QB for the Golden Tornado in the season opener, but senior third-year starter Cooper Baxter seemed to nail down the job by generating 134 yards passing and 130 rushing two weeks ago against Meadville.

But a ruptured hamstring sidelined Baxter a few days later. Schnur was handed the reins and put up his huge passing number against a stellar opponent in McDowell up in Erie.

Siket is a sophomore at North Catholic. Joey Prentice was the starting quarterback for the Trojans this year, but got hurt in his team’s 18-17 win over Blackhawk.

Siket stepped in behind center for North last week and completed 10 of 12 passes, half of those for touchdowns.

In my high school days, if the starting quarterback got hurt, the football wasn’t going in the air.

Period.

Now we live in the era of the “spread” offense at virtually all levels of football, including high school. You still see an occasional version of the Wing-T, but not too much.

The “option” offense has almost become extinct. Football fans my age remember the Oklahoma-Nebraska rivalry, when the option was pretty much all you saw.

I couldn’t help but smile when Kiski Area coach Sam Albert told me Butler was one of few teams that knew how to practice defending the Wing-T “because high school defenses rarely see that offense anymore.”

High school football has changed, indeed.

But football is football.

Play good defense, don’t turn the ball over, play error-free special teams ... you’ll win no matter what method you choose to move the ball.

John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle.