Friday Night Lights

Treat yourself to a few episodes of NBC's Friday Night Lights. Those who say it's just a football show may also tell you that Moby Dick is just a whaling manual (F. Buechner). The acting, writing, and production style place the show in a class of its own. Kyle Chandler in the role of Coach Eric Taylor does a fine job of portraying a man who is driven and simple but not stupid, and Connie Britton as Tammy Taylor lights it up every time she's in the action. There are no weaklings in the supporting cast either. The characters are realistic and engaging. The stories it tells are our stories. When you watch, you laugh, you cry, you ache, you sing, and at times you soar.

FNL takes me for brief visits to night lit football fields in towns across Arkansas on Friday nights in the early 1970s. I don't revel in some made up glory days and don't have a particularly jockish outlook on life. Nevertheless things happen in the Friday night milieu that shape us in various measure, for better or worse, and tattoo our souls and spirits.

I'm not talking about how "the tough get going when the going gets tough," or how "there's no 'I' in 'team'." I guess there are various degrees of truth sports cliches, but I'm talking about the transcendent moments:

when for a few seconds or a few quarters you and your teammates played better than you actually were, and you sensed something you later in life would learn is called 'synchronicity';

when your heart soared high above the stadium lights as the girl you wanted to walk you off the field actually showed up and did so; and when your heart broke when she didn't, but your father was there, silent and strong, and the meaning of things like 'manhood' and 'family' began to come into focus;

when you learned that underneath your pain and doubt there lay remarkable reserves of strength and endurance which would be there when you needed them in some immeasurably more terrible time in the future;

when you learned that defeat and disappointment are but way stations and not final destinations;

when you looked across a huddle into the eyes of guys who would never sit at your dining table or cruise Frank Brannan's with you in your car or worship with you at your church on Sunday morning but to whom you were utterly bonded in that moment with a unity never achieved by integration, constitutional mandates, or social engineering.

Like all good art, Friday Night Lights gives us a glimpse of the Eternal in the midst of the temporal - of the Sublime amid the mundane - of the Magnificent disguised in the trivial. Good work. Good game.