This is year No. 40.

That number has no significance to anyone else, perhaps, but it does to me.

This season marks my 40th year of covering high school football. It goes back to the fall of 1979, when I covered games for Pittsburgh Suburban Community Newspapers and the Irwin Standard Observer.

I did games at Yough High School when its scoreboard clock still had hands on it.

Through all these years, I have never stopped appreciating the purity of football at this level.

There is no Le’Veon Bell trying to decide when he will report to camp and grace his Steeler teammates with his presence while raking in $14 million. There is no Nick Saban and others like him pulling in millions of dollars to coach a college football team.

No Jerry Sandusky, Urban Meyer, Jerry Jones, Spygate, Deflategate ... you get the picture.

With high school football, what you see is what you get.

Coaches are paid by supplemental contracts. Add up the dollars they make for the hours they put in and maybe they’re making a couple of bucks an hour. And they don’t care.

They’re passionate about the game and they care about the kids.

The kids themselves give up much of their summer to pound the weight room, work on conditioning, then sweat it out in the month of August on the practice field.

Why?

To play the game they love.

Ask anybody who ever played high school football. They emerge from the locker room, the band begins playing the school fight song, the players crash through a paper sign made by the cheerleaders and they mob each other in a fired-up frenzy while community members and classmates rise and cheer from the stands.

Those memories are vivid. They never go away.

Because they’re genuiine.

They all relish the time spent on the field, standing next to buddies on the sidelines or lining up next to them along the line of scrimmage.

It’s football being played by people who truly appreciate the game and the hard-earned privilege of earning a uniform.

John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle