When I grew up in Riverhead, as a son of two Polish immigrants, football wasn’t something I was interested in playing. I played PAL soccer early on, and then got into little league baseball and CYO basketball as I grew older. But something in me was always curious about the sport because of the town I grew up in.

Back then, every Saturday during the fall, the stands at Coach Mike McKillop Memorial Field were packed with spectators. Cow bells echoed down Pulaski Street as the football team crashed through the Blue Waves banner and onto the field to the tune of ACDC’s “Hells Bells.” Being on the football team was a big deal. 

I remember watching crazy legs Eddie Wansor at quarterback, the bruiser Mike Owen at halfback and soft-hands Mike Heigh at tight end in 2003 when they won the Suffolk County championship at Stony Brook University. I was in the stands — watching with pride and admiration. Longtime radio voice of the Blue Waves Pat Kelly took me along to watch the game, as I was very good friends with his son. 

It was mind-boggling for me to see the support this town gave its football team. It wasn’t just family in the crowd at Stony Brook University. It was regular town residents, alumni, students — anyone with any connection to Riverhead, they were there. That’s how much it meant to everyone. There’s nowhere else they’d rather be on a Saturday. 

Though I played some football in middle school to try to be like my idols, being so new to the sport, I decided it wasn’t for me. I continued watching the games, seeing guys like Miguel Maysonet, Tyler Gilliam, Andrew Smith, Timmy Velys, Rasheen Moore and countless others find success.

So, my junior year in 2007, I decided to give it another go. It was the best decision I ever made. The memories I made that season will last a lifetime. 

Even though I was a newcomer, I was brought right into the brotherhood. There’s no team sport like football. Everybody has a role, from the headliner to the last person on the bench. It was the first time I understood what it meant to be on a team.

We practiced hard. Coach Leif Shay was strict and expected nothing but perfection. If one person on the team messed up, we all paid for it. We had to hold each other accountable. If you were on time, you were late — a philosophy I still hold in my life today. 

The 2008 group I was a part of was coached up since they were kids. They already built the foundation from youth football. It was led by parents who were committed and all in. By the time they were all on varsity, we had a shot at greatness.

I wanted nothing more than to be like my idols and win a Suffolk County championship. As the wins began to stack up, the potential of doing just that became a reality. We not only won the Suffolk County championship that season, but we were the first team in Riverhead history to win a Long Island championship.

When I tell you we were rock stars, that was an understatement. When we won it all, there were thousands of people at the Liberty Bell at Pulaski Street elementary school to ring off the 42 points we scored on Elmont. As we pulled up with a police escort, people were honking their horns, cheering, crying — it was like a movie. All the blood, sweat and tears paid off. Those guys will be my brothers for life, and it was only my first season.

Riverhead went on to win two more Suffolk County championships in 2012 and 2013.

The next big group was supposed to come through, but then COVID hit, austerity measures shocked the district, cutting sports and forcing parents to leave. We’ve been picking up the pieces ever since. 

It’s been a while since Riverhead was the team to beat for football, but we’re a football town. We’re due.

The coaches are committed to bringing that back from the bottom levels to the top. There are champions at every level coaching the youth. When I speak to the parents at those lower levels, they’re committed. Those groups of parents and kids need to lead the charge and not leave the district. The talent is here. They will become those idols for the next generation and so forth. 

But even though there have been championships won in PAL football, some parents have still decided to move based on the varsity team’s performance. Why not be the change and lead the charge to bring this program back to its glory days? Winning a championship with your friends will always mean more than winning a championship with complete strangers. 

It takes a village to turn things around. And we have it. Anyone with any association with Riverhead will tell you — we all bleed blue.

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Our institutions and traditions, handed down in America through the generations, are now under assault and seem unsteady, not able to withstand the shock of a new authority sweeping away what once we held as inviolable.

I’m speaking, of course, about Major League Baseball’s seemingly endless rule changes. Last year the vulgarians in power scrapped the requirement that an intentional walk must consist of four balls thrown outside the strike zone. A manager now has only to indicate to the home plate umpire that his team wants to put the opposing batter on first base.

The intentional walk, part of the chess match played by heavily tattooed men chewing tobacco, is employed if a team doesn’t want to face a hot hitter or to set up a double play.

Question: Why change a quirky and fascinating moment in a game that true fans relish?

Answer: The baseball powers-that-be believe it will quicken the pace of the game.

Somewhere: Abner Doubleday is weeping.

Baseball is a game requiring great skill. It’s been said that consistently hitting a ball thrown at 90-plus mph that is not moving in a straight line is the hardest feat in all of sports. (If you can do that only three out of 10 times you will be paid many millions.) It’s also the slowest of our games, and the most beautiful, because of the leisurely procession of its moments.

The pace of the summer game has always been a respite from the manic rush of American life. Baseball says, “Slow down. Really watch. There’s more here than meets the eye. Learn something.” It’s not for nothing that the political world has co-opted the expression “inside baseball” to describe intricate maneuvering.

These days, with human attention spans on par with squirrels because of touch-screen tyrants in everyone’s fist (Americans on average check their phones every four minutes), baseball is the closest thing to Zen you can have while eating and drinking stuff that’s bad for you.

The need for speed is to get younger people to watch the sport. Team owners want more folks to watch the games and make more money. I get it. It’s just how you go about it.

New rules for 2023 include putting a timer on a pitcher, giving him 15 seconds to deliver to the plate when he gets the ball with the bases empty, and 20 seconds with a man on. Also, infield shifts are banned, and two infielders must be positioned on either side of second base when the pitch is thrown, and all four infielders have to have both feet on the infield dirt. The size of the bases will be increased from 15 inches square to 18 inches.

Wonders never cease — I agree with the baseball barons on eliminating shifts and making the bases bigger. But the pitch clock? No way. In a tight game, in the late innings, with runners on base, it’s a delight to take time to anticipate the next pitch, and not have to watch an electronic indicator counting down the seconds. Take your time!

But it’s not just a matter of time. It’s also allowing the fans to see something unexpected, such as that old-time intentional walk. It used to be that the catcher looks for a sign from his manager in the dugout, who tucks his thumb under and holds up four fingers.

The catcher relays the info to the pitcher and stands behind the plate, rather than crouching. The pitcher delivers a pitch that is two or three feet off the plate, and the catcher makes a graceful, two-step sideways move to catch the ball. Four times and the batter heads to first.

Don Drysdale, the great Dodger ace (or borderline psychopath) of long ago, didn’t like the intentional walk. A pitcher known for occasionally throwing at a batter’s skull, Big D was said to hit an opponent on his first pitch after he got the signal to issue the free pass, which automatically awarded first base to the batter. His irrefutable logic was why waste three perfectly good pitches to put a man on?

Making the intentional walk automatic robs the fan of seeing once-in-a-blue-moon screwups. There have been occasions when the pitcher has thrown wildly, missing his moving target, and a runner has scored from third, and also on occasion a pitcher has thrown a little too closely to the plate and a batter has reached out and stroked a base hit. Not often, but it’s happened.

As Casey Stengel would say, “You could look it up.”

The abomination known as the designated hitter is now entering its second year in the National League. This means there are 10 players to a side, and not the mystical number of nine players, corresponding in perfect harmony with nine innings, which relates to three, an unbreakable relationship with nine, as in three strikes, three outs.

But four balls, you say? Never contradict a person when he’s being mystical.

It’s probably best to leave the final word to someone who actually played the game. Asked about rule changes, former Major League catcher Russell Martin told Sportsnet: “My thing is, if they really want to speed up the game, then when a guy hits a home run, to speed up the game should a guy, just like in softball, when he hits it, should he just walk to the dugout? It’d be quicker. I’m just wondering, at what point do we just keep the game, the game?”

Amen, brother Martin.

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Which leads me to conclude there are worse ways to kill a weekend.

But what Ms. Holiday was getting at is it’s always prudent to remember on this annual conspiracy of florists that not all good things come when love comes to town.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Like love itself, all this can be baffling, but stay with me here. Show some patience, which is something love requires.

The traditional American song, “Careless Love,” recorded many times but owned by Bessie Smith, speaks to what can happen when an accelerated heart rate combines with being struck suddenly blind staring at a light all around one person.

“Love, oh love, oh careless love

You fly through my head like wine

You’ve wrecked the life of a many poor soul

And you nearly spoiled this life of mine.”

This love-with-consequences theme goes back to the man who gives his name to today’s feast day.

There are many legends attached to St. Valentine.

One story goes that St. Valentine believed in love so fervently he fearlessly married Christian couples in ancient Rome when doing so was a capital offense. He was arrested but was spared a dinner engagement with some lions when Emperor Claudius II took a liking to him. Still a fool for love, Valentine tried to convert the emperor, which didn’t go down too well.

The emperor had Valentine beaten with clubs, stoned and then publicly beheaded. Talk about careless love.

Some honor the martyr to love on this day by celebrating with trysts at motels where the bed is shaped like a heart, the tub is a giant cocktail glass and there’s a complimentary bottle of uncertain vintage. The fortunate ones, at least.

The triumph of hope over experience has often been a definition of a second or third or Liz Taylor-number of marriages, but it can also be a working explanation for love in general.

I once did a business story for a newspaper that tried to go beyond the flowers/sweets/lingerie matrix and discovered that V-Day for divorce attorneys meant a happy spike in billable hours. It seems lots of romantics get hitched on February 14 and more marriages inevitably beget more divorces.

David Mejias, a partner at a Glen Cove-based law firm specializing in divorce, told me that after the glow of joyous emotions during Christmas and New Year’s — when the love-intoxicated believe everyone is as blitzed as they are — many see Valentine’s Day as “an idealized situation. They look at their own lives and think it might be time for a change,” Mr. Mejias said.

(It’s tragic to think of an April morning when the Valentine Day marriages are wrecked on the rocks of dubious bathroom behavior or alarming in-laws.)

But those are in many ways sad cases, and what we want to celebrate and remember is the battle-tested bravery of great lovers. They’re the ones who have gone through the fire because of their commitment to each other and have a to-hell-with-you defiance to throw in the faces of society, parents, tribes or any convention that would dare separate them.

Think of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde, Donald Trump and Donald Trump.

Except for the last couple, all the others had to fight for their right to party with each other.

Walter Benjamin, the great German writer, made a study of, among other things, German romanticism. ­ Benjamin said, completely seriously – maybe a bit too seriously, he was German, after all – that the only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

His counsel to give your all to the love of someone with full knowledge there will be unpleasant or even dangerous consequences, and somehow putting all that from your mind, is one of the bravest acts a person can perform. That courage is truly what makes the world go ‘round.

What is love? Love is like jazz, and not just when it’s choreographed correctly. Remember Louis Armstrong’s response to someone who asked him to explain his art — if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

But Shakespeare did make a fine attempt: “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake — it’s everything except what it is!”

Got it?

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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