No matter where you start counting, Bel Air High School has been around a long time.The folks who lead the school today, citing the 1927 edition of "El Adios," the BAHS yearbook, believe their school officially began operating in 1816, the year the first principal was hired at what was then known as the Bel Air Academy on Pennsylvania Avenue.By that reckoning, the school is 200 years old this year, which obviously calls for a celebration. This past weekend a series of home games in all fall sports were played, with alumni invited to come out and look around.Later this month will be the homecoming football game (Oct. 20 versus North Harford), a fall play "Fright Night" presented Oct. 27-29 and the Harford County Public Schools marching band showcase Oct. 30.There will be a presentation of "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" Dec. 1-3 along with a student art show those days, a poetry slam for students and alumni Dec. 17, a winter concert series featuring students and alumni Dec. 16, 19, 20 and 21, plus a student and alumni art show the latter three days.We doubt anyone can say for certainty if Bel Air High is really 200 years old. Back in the early 1800s, there were no public schools in Harford County. Children were educated in the home – many not at all – and older boys might be sent to private preparatory schools, if they came from a family with means. The Bel Air Academy was such a school, but since nobody around today was living when the academy began teaching its first students, its age is an exercise in conjecture.Local historians like C. Milton Wright and Marilyn Larew placed the Pennsylvania Avenue building's construction as 1814. Larew also writes that the school was incorporated in 1811 as the county's first preparatory school, and Wright speculates actual construction of the first building was delayed because of the War of 1812.Many loyal readers of The Aegis are BAHS alumni. The oldest group, who graduated before 1951, went to school in a brick building on Gordon Street that is no longer standing, taken down after the current Bel Air Elementary School opened in 1984. Those who graduated from BAHS between 1951 and 2009 went to class in the brick building on Heighe Street, considered an architectural model for its time, that was razed after the current building opened in 2009.Older living BAHS alumni had their elementary school classes in the 1889 building on Gordon Street that is still standing and was serving as the second home of the Bel Air Academy when it became a public school. One of those alumni, Barbara Barkes, recalled those days in a phone conversation with one of our editors Friday.Barkes, who graduated from the first Heighe Street building in 1958 and now lives in Johnson City, Tenn., said she has a 1910 yearbook that belonged to her late aunt. In those days the yearbook was called "The Phoenix," and the high school students were still attending classes in the oldest Gordon Street building, where Barkes would have some of her early elementary school classes in the late 1940s. She plans to donate the yearbook to her alma mater.One indisputable fact about BAHS alumni is they are fiercely loyal to their school. No matter which building they had their classes in or when, they are proud members of Bobcat Nation for life and, frankly, who can blame them.Regardless of how far back you want to count, Bel Air High School is the anchor of its community, an institution that has educated thousands of young people and prepared them for their journey though adulthood. BAHS, we salute your excellence and look forward to many hundreds of years more of your service.