Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the mighty Rams stood in the majestic calm of their frigid, pre-game battlefield. Outside without a proper coat, my six-year old, Charlie, stood in an eternal line at the frozen, undermanned concession stand. The undefeated Rams awaited the opening kickoff of their game against the hated Spartans — their bitter rival, the only team to beat the Rams in over three years. Charlie awaited a Styrofoam cup of tepid cocoa — bitter swill, sold for two bucks a slug by the girls in the pep squad. The Rams had been waiting for this game all season. Charlie had been waiting for his cocoa for half an hour. The excitement was palpable. The cocoa? Palatable.

It was a chilly Friday night in America and Charlie had come to cheer his Rams on to victory in the biggest high school football game of the season. Damn the cold, daddy; this is war. And Charlie wanted to be on the front lines.

Over 10,000 people joined Charlie and me at the Rams game that night. To help put that in perspective, that is about 45 percent of all the people who live in our school district. There were, and often are, more tickets sold than there are seats in the stadium. But no one minds. After all, you aren’t really paying to watch the football game. You are paying to be at the football game. The more crazy people there are, decked out in school colors and screaming their heads off, the more certain you feel that you are in the only place in the world that it is truly proper for you to be. If that comes at the cost of a good view of the action, well, so be it.

Charlie and I couldn’t find good seats, so we went down along the fence close to the Ram bench. I am tall enough to see over and around the players, but down at field-level Charlie couldn’t see a thing. As the Rams and Spartans pounded each other in a scoreless game, back and forth in a titanic struggle between two of the best defenses in local football, I would lift Charlie high in the air right before each snap so he could see over all the players. He had the best view in the house. He was cold and he was out of cocoa. But he was a happy kid, watching his Rams, flying high in the air.

Charlie was fully invested in the game, body and soul. But my mind wandered. It’s this problem I have. I’m guessing you have it to, since you’re reading this on a conservative website when you should probably be working, cutting the grass, or fighting crime (Batman loves Ricochet; he posts mostly at night).

I see politics everywhere. I mean everywhere. I sometimes wonder if the ratio of letters they include in Charlie’s Alpha-Bits is specially calibrated to increase the likelihood he’ll see words in his bowl that subliminally teach him to support the radical gay agenda. I pick out all the ‘O’s just to be safe.

So while Charlie was six feet in the air, cheering on the Rams, I was distracted. He was watching the big game; I was staring off into the distance … thinking about Russell Kirk.

Russell Kirk is the intellectual godfather of modern American conservative thought. If William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was the emotional cry of a dying post-war conservatism, yelling at the liberal tide of history to “Stop!”, Kirk’s near-contemporaneous, epoch-defining The Conservative Mind was a sober reflection on those currents within Anglo-American society that manifestly must not stop. Kirk identified six canons of conservatism, six fundamental threads running back through the work of Eliot and Coleridge and Santayana all the way to the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke.

First — and it is surely no accident that it is first — Kirk claimed that all conservative thought begins with a firm belief in the existence of a transcendent order. Sometimes rooted in divine revelation, sometimes in something less explicitly religious, Kirk believed that for the conservative, there is always a framework, an immutable justice to which right thinking must always adhere.

Second, Kirk’s conservative mind has an appreciation for the “variety and mystery of human existence,” an innate hostility toward the enforced uniformity and blandness of most radical worldviews. Third, and perhaps most controversially, Kirk argued that a truly conservative view rests on the twin ideas of class and order. To Kirk, a conservative values a place in the world and isn’t threatened by the thought of having one. Fourth, Kirk wrote that conservatives appreciate the indissoluble link between the private possession of property and freedom.

Fifth, Kirk believed that the conservative mind has a firm attachment to the wisdom of the past, resisting the anarchy that comes with an impulsive embrace of the new simply because it is new. And sixth, Kirk’s conservative recognizes that there is a difference between change and reform — that what is new is not only not always better; it is almost always worse. Clearly Kirk was writing about high school football.

In football, before there can be a play, before there can even be a playbook from which to choose the play, there must be a scheme. The scheme is the personality of a football team, the philosophy to which the coaches will teach and within which all plays will be designed and executed. Good teams may incorporate aspects of other schemes into their base scheme; extraordinarily versatile teams may attempt to play with multiple schemes. But there is always, always a scheme.

To be successful, every coach and player must buy into the scheme completely. The assistant running backs coach might secretly think he has figured out a way to reintroduce the Delaware Wing-T offense to big-time high school football, but if the team is built to run the Shotgun Spread, he has to keep his theories about the Wing-T to himself. There is and must always be a shared order on the football field, whatever that order may be. Right or wrong, there must be order.

There is no such thing as an ideal football player. A good receiver is tall and fast. A good offensive lineman is large and powerful. A good running back has quick feet and excellent vision. A good quarterback has a strong arm and a sharp mind. If all the players were the same, the team would lose every game by a wide margin. If the nose tackle decided he wanted to be a free safety, not only would he lack the physical tools to play his new position, but his effort to be something he is not would detract from the very important thing he naturally is.

Football is a game of space. On the surface, football is about the offense moving down the field toward the end zone, slowly conquering territory. But more subtly, each individual play, each action within the play, is about creating or denying space. Football is the minutely choreographed battle for control of hotly contested square inches of critical grass. Every interaction between players on a football field is a battle for control of a specific domain, with the cumulative outcome of those thousands of battles dictating who wins and who loses.

Football is also a game of discipline. The scheme, the formation, and the play all dictate a specific role for every player on every down. Each player has an assignment and the success of the play relies on everyone doing his job, every time. As the play develops, the player will think he sees something the others don’t and will be tempted to deviate from his assignment to address what he thinks he sees. But he mustn’t. He must stick to what he knows. He must do his job.

In football the scheme is a transcendent order. The implementation of that order requires a variety of different classes of people. Without the right mix of all types, each knowing its role, the team will lose. Each player fights to possess property. Win the battle and you may score. Win enough battles and your team will win the game. Good players resist the impulse to change, because individual deviation from the play is a recipe for collective disaster.

Transcendent order, necessary variety, class, property, resistance to change. Russell Kirk must have loved the game of football.

This is what I think about while I’m holding a six-year old over my head.

I tried to root for the Rams, really I did. I told myself — I told Charlie — that I wanted all the kids on both teams to have a good time, to play hard, and to stay safe, but that, of course, I was rooting for the Rams, just like he was.

But I am a Spartan. I might live among the Rams now, but I am not one of them. I went to the high school whose kids stood on the far sideline. In my heart, I belonged in the visitors section, cheering hard for my alma mater to pummel the Rams. The Rams might have had a good run of it the last few seasons, but everyone knows the Spartans own football in this town and no true son of Sparty would ever root for the hated Rams — not that night, not ever.

As far as anyone could tell, I was just another Rams fan standing on the Rams sideline with his little Ram-loving kid. But inside, I was a closet Spartan hidden among the Rams, a proud, but secret traitor … who was shamelessly lying to a six-year old about his tribal alliances.

But then Charlie looked at me, a big smile on his little Ram face, and said, “This is fun! I don’t want to go home!” And the secret Spartan in me just … melted.

We, the Spartans, have been coming up to this stadium every other year for as long as I can remember. And in the years we, the Spartans, don’t come north to play the Rams, we, the Rams, go down to the city to play the Spartans. This year we, the Spartans, are sitting in the visitor section, next to the smelly port-a-potty, while we, the Rams, have the nice seats by the concession stand with the lousy cocoa. Next year, we, the Rams, will drive through all that miserable traffic to get downtown to sit in the visitors section while we, the Spartans, will sit on the side of the stadium with the view of the city.

This game, this league, this sport. They are all traditions older than I am. Lord willing, they are all traditions that will still be here when Charlie is secretly rooting for the Rams while his children are frantically cheering for the Spartans (Or the Trojans. Or the Warriors. Or, God save us, the Tigers.).

The autumnal rhythm of high school football, stadium to stadium, week to week, is a transcendent order all its own. And it takes Rams and Spartans and Trojans and Warriors and, good Lord, even Tigers — a vast variety of different kinds of people, all sitting in their groups, all wearing their colors, all with their own territories, but all welcome in all the other territories — for this tradition to have meaning. And there wasn’t a single soul at that game that night who wanted to see any of it change, no matter who won.

High school football is a magnificent, uniquely American spectacle that plays out in every community across the nation simultaneously: countless schools, thousands of games, one experience. If you ask me, if you ask Russell Kirk, if you ask Charlie, that is something very special worth conserving.

Oh, by the way. The game was tied in the final seconds and we won on a goal-line quarterback sneak! Sure, it was close … but we had them all the way.

We, the Spartans.