Tonight in northern Michigan, near the dark autumn-chilled shores of Lake Huron, Oscoda Area High School was scheduled to tee it up against John Glenn, but despite the fact that John Glenn is 85 years old and probably doesn't move as well in space anymore, the game has been canceled.

As a precaution.

So has the remainder of the football schedule.

The head coach and the school board are simply too worried about the health of the Oscoda Owls, emphasis on the Ow!, because the Owls have been getting killed, and the school administrators want to make sure that remained in the figurative sense.

The Owls dropped the opener to Flint Hamady, 46-0, lost the next week to Whittemore Prescott, 30-0, and followed the 0-2 start with twin 44-0 shellackifications courtesy of Ogemaw Heights and Tawas.

The Tawas fray was delayed 24 hours until enough Owls could gain medical clearance, so banged up where the fellas from the previous week. They were down to 20 players as it was, many of them inexperienced sophomores.

At 0-4 and scoreless, coach Kyle Tobin had seen enough.

"I have 28 years of coaching experience in high school and college," Tobin told the school board, "and I know the difference between a team playing bad and team that's unsafe."

Players and their parents protested vehemently, and future Owls opponents were no doubt disappointed as well, but cooler heads realized that there was no provision in the hard-scrabble winners-never-quit, quitters-never-win high school football ethos that covered Oscoda's situation, technically speaking.

Reading about the Owls and their guardian angel elders yesterday, I felt bad for the kids, and then because I'm never more than a twitch or two from abject bitterness, I immediately felt bad for me.

Where were adults like these when I was playing?

Where were the responsible voices who might have saved us from innumerable contusions and incalculable mortification?

We were pretty unsafe as I recall, maybe not to the exact dimensions of contemporary Owl-dom, but painfully close, and I don't mean that in the figurative sense. I mean filled-with-pain close.

Whether we were as demonstrably unsafe as we were demonstrably bad is one essentially impossible conundrum.

We lost the opener in -- what was it, 1927? -- 42-0, and, while it's documentable that we actually won the second game, 7-0, when the opposing quarterback inexplicably threw a pass to one of our cornerbacks who was fleeing to the bus prematurely at the time and happened to traverse the end zone in the process, we wound up being outscored in the first four games, 97-7.

Not as bad as Oscoda's 164-0 for four nights, but we lost the next three by a combined score of 85-13, the only difference between us and the Owls was that we got to play the next three, for which I take no solace. If we weren't obviously unsafe, that was due merely to spectator indifference.

The notion that the football field was not a safe place first surfaced the previous year, when we sophomores got used mostly as live bait for the frustrated but able varsity. Not a few times during that autumn, it occurred to me during live scrimmages that I could be at home eating Oreos and watching the Three Stooges hitting each other over the head with monkey wrenches instead of being part of this equally sick slapstick.

The monkey wrench with my name on it was senior tackle Joe Blazosky, who was 6 feet 3 and weighed 195 pounds, monstrous for his time, and soon to be in receipt of an actual Division I scholarship offer. One day, I was "pass protecting" against him. Being too inexperienced to know when to fall to the ground and go fetal on him, Blazosky drove me into and out of the backfield in one continuous bruising semi-circle, then an additional 20 yards in random directions until someone mercifully blew a whistle. On the way back to the huddle, an assistant coach said, "Collier, you should give Blazosky a dime for that ride he took you on."

"A dime?" I remember thinking, "I'll give him five bucks to shoot me in the head."

When I finally got into a varsity game myself the next year, I had it in my mind that the perfect strangers on the other team might not take such a reckless delight in inflicting pain on me as the boys in my own village. Wrong again, chinstrap breath.

Lining up with the kick-receiving unit for my junior season's opening moments, I found the guy I was supposed to block, No. 80, and it wasn't hard because he was the biggest human I'd ever see until I randomly passed Shaq in the hallway of a Florida hotel 28 years later. No. 80 found me a few seconds later, knocked me flat on my back, and stepped directly on my breastbone on his way to inflicting further damage farther downfield.

Walking to the sideline in some altered state of consciousness, only this was clear: This was going to be one long season. One long, unsafe season.

So here's to you, you lucky Oscoda Owls. Go home tonight and have some Oreos.