In ancient times, let’s say as late as the 1950s, the sight of a football stadium in autumn stirred the glands of millions of people who were still able to confess a measureable level of sanity.

The players they watched in the big college games could actually be observed in classrooms during the week. In the professional leagues most of players spent the winter and spring working in steel mills to pay their bills, or they stayed home changing diapers.

This is 2011. It’s not necessary to document the corporate status that pro football has achieved. The game and its promoters have wrapped it in gold and spawned millions of disciples who play fantasy football with the fervor of actual head coaches and with most of their inside knowledge. America goes bonkers on Monday night. Add Sunday night. Add six hours Sunday afternoon. Click on the TV on game day and you get splashed with flying confetti and ten American flags; after which you are overwhelmed by a country western guitar plucker with a cast of thousands inviting you to get ready for some football in surround sound and HD. By then, how can you not be ready? And the country laps it up. Why? Often it IS a good show. The perfect game for television.

But partly because of the omnipresence of pro football, college football has risen with the tide in television exposure and now has created a monster. To compete in the big leagues of the major schools, where the big money is in television and bowl games, they have enlisted the best there is from the high schools. In thousands of homes across the country college scouts become part of the core family, sometimes outranking grandpa. Agents are on the horn the day they can do it legally. Television money into the millions of dollars is now available to the major universities that win football games, and to their lesser competitors who scoop up the leftovers in a classic demonstration of trickle down economics. Coaches who win in the big leagues of college football pull down millions of dollars. To keep pace with each other they send out droves of scouts, who sometimes have to battle the droves of agents who hover on the fringes. They also have to compete with college boosters, the most frenzied of whom eventually embarrass the school with illegal gifts to the players, as we have seen played out in the scandals this year.

So a friend who knows all about this invited me to watch a practice of his own school, one of the private colleeges in St. Paul. He introduced me to the coach, who said his players might be interested in a few thoughts from somebody who wrote pro football for years as part of his exertions as a daily columnist.

It was a lovely day on campus, the fall coming in, sunlight engulfing the field, making the water cooler a popular destination. Something like 55 or 60 young men were on the field, running plays, scrimmaging, slapping each others’ behinds when the play worked, or the defense doing it when the linemen made a stop. It was the football atmospheric I remembered from my high school years. They were football players for sure, getting ready for the games on Friday nights or Saturday. The coaches moved in their midst, upbeat, teaching, clapping their hands, changing a lineman’s stance, laughing at the kid’s rebuttal. I saw very few out there who were going to get acquainted with an NFL scout. What I saw were college students playing football and playing it well enough to compete.

When the coach ended practice he introduced the visitor. He said I had known the pros up close, and that they might be interested in some of my thoughts.

I told them I could have spent all day watching. It restored the football I knew, the random horsing around, but also the hitting, the satisfaction of making a good tackle, faking out the linebacker, but doing it with the kids who were my classmates. It was the same mix of laughs, a little goofing around, and the coaches putting a damper on that in a hurry. What else was it? It was still something close to family; it was practice, and then grabbing the books from your locker and bicycling home.

I told them what playing the game had meant to me. I talked about the idea of it, Team, the hours they’d shared reaching for a goal, they would not forget: the nuttiness of some of the days and the characters on the team—their faces and quirks, some of the tears, the coach who taught and supported them. It was their special community.

But it was something beyond that. They would discover later in life that whatever their success and rebuffs, the relationships in their lives would be the most important part of their lives, and one those relationships that would really not end grew right here on the field.

Does the game matter? I remembered a football player named Walter Payton, a Hall of Fame running back of the Chicago Bears. Everybody who played football, teammate or opponent, loved Walter Paton. He played a football of joy. Once after being tackled, he was caught untying the shoe laces of the referee, Bernie Kukar, who was busy pulling bodies off the pileup.

When Walter Payton he died of cancer not long after his career ended, one of the networks did a program bringing together some of the men he played with and against. It was a remarkable testimony. These were aggressive people who made a living beating on each other for big money, scheming against each other in a concussive game. But in remembering Walter Payton, all of these people came together in a solidarity of grief and gratitude for his life. He was the rare football player who could reach a willful man like Mike Ditka and touch him with humility; an undemonstrative man like Bud Grant and touch him with tenderness; an uncompromising competitor like Mike Singletary and touch him with peace.

Sometime, it’s still a kid’s game, which we tend to forget.

About Jim Klobuchar:

In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.