YESTERDAY, AS THE leaves shimmered in the autumn sun, I saw my younger son and his senior teammates play the final league high school football game. It was, as Yogi Berra would say, "deja vu all over again."

I had gone through this ritual three years ago with our older son and reveled in it. Watching your kid's final game, whatever sport is being played, is a rite of passage that we parents of high school seniors shoulder our way through. It makes you feel both proud and old.

So as I sat among the gung-ho masses cheering at the St. Paul's-Boys' Latin game, I found myself looking back on my career as a football parent.

Although I would have denied it last Friday, when along with a cluster of other shivering parents I sat in a bitter wind and witnessed our St. Paul's boys lose a heartbreaker to McDonogh 14-7, I will miss attending my son's high school football games. The games gave me something to shoot for, a couple of hours away from the sea of adult responsibilities, a chance to spend four quarters in the colorful, unpredictable arena that is high school sports.

Being a football parent has also motivated me to travel around town, to haul myself, for example, over to Patterson High School on the east side and Mount St. Joseph on the west side. There, on steamy Saturdays late in August, I would watch a handful of metro-area teams engage in brief, half-field scrimmages. Invariably after observing one of these early-season samplers - this August I saw Mount St. Joseph, Forest Park, Patterson, Hammond, C. Milton Wright and St. Paul's - I would feel the urge to prognosticate; to predict which teams were going to have phenomenal seasons. Invariably, I would be wrong.

By the time your second son is wearing a football helmet, you are well past the point of asking him why he plays the game. Long ago, when my wife and I were rookie parents, we resolved that our then "little boys" were not going to play football, they might get hurt. We soon learned, as countless parents before us had learned, that as your kids get older your control over them grows smaller. Kids have a way of burrowing toward their extracurricular interests and our guys took to football like boys to mud. The comparison, as anyone who has washed football uniforms knows, is apt. As for all the time spent in emergency rooms, I figure it has given the kids an inside look at potential careers in sports medicine.

The second time around the gridiron is a lot like the second time you scout out colleges with your offspring. There are plenty of infuriating times when generations clash, tempers flare and plans do not proceed according to expectations. But experience teaches that the dark clouds will fade and adolescent life will slog forward. There are also good times, shared enjoyments and insights. These might even generate a sentence or two of discussion.

Many parents have told me that while football is not their passion, they are nonetheless grateful that their sons are committed to something. Passion is the buzzword these days at college admissions offices, which say they are looking for "lopsided" students, kids with a deep, abiding interest in something - playing the tuba, crunching numbers or tackling running backs. Of course, colleges say a lot of things, many of them contradictory. A few years back, well-rounded, not lopsided, applicants were in vogue. And after years of stressing the importance of taking a boatload of standardized tests and of applying early in the admissions process, some colleges are dropping these once-sacrosanct procedures. I guess the lesson for kids is to follow your passion wherever it leads you and to enjoy the ride. Yesterday, my son and his senior teammates, Brian, Al, Shel, C.J., the two Davids, Qwenton, Bubba, Ryan, Chris, Steve, John, Mike and Christian, followed it to the football field at Boys' Latin. There they were pitted against Patrick Mahoney, the BL quarterback, and his teammates.

As the parent of a St. Paul's player, I was supposed to regard Patrick as "the opposition." But I remember him as my former first baseman, a nice kid. He played on the Comets in the Roland Park Baseball Leagues, a team of 8-year-old sluggers that I used to coach. Patrick batted third, my son batted fourth. That was almost 10 years ago. This reunion of former teammates, albeit on hostile ground, happens a lot around Baltimore. It is one of the appealing aspects of participating in high school sports, at least for the parents.

I suspect that this sense of a shared past, of being connected to a town and its rhythms, was lost on the mighty football players. Yesterday, they seemed consumed with the here and now that meant a 28-7 victory for St. Paul's.

But for the senior parents, those of us who have already seen an autumn or two slip by, it is a feeling that lingered deep into the November night.