Saturday afternoon football always gets the short end of the stick from us media types. Friday nights get all the glory.

It must be because it has a cool nickname.

Friday night football is “Friday Night Lights,” and it’s the night of all nights in high school sports. The television stations spend more time showing highlights of Friday night football than all of the other sports combined for the balance of the week. There are usually two, sometimes three cameramen at each game, and occasionally the cable access channel rolls into town to broadcast the game.

Saturday games get one cameraman, at most, and the third-string news anchor reading a 15-second script over a couple of highlights. The TV folks don’t hold any tailgate parties on Saturday afternoon, either.

We’re just as guilty in the print media. We’ll devote all of the resources we can to Friday night’s slate. Unless there’s a full docket of marquee games on Saturday afternoon, we’ll usually cover two or three football games and send the other  reporters to cover soccer or field hockey. All very deserving of coverage, for sure, but the “Saturday schools,” as I like to call them, are sometimes an afterthought in the world of high school football.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because this week, all of the marquee games in our area are being played Friday night — Brunswick/Lewiston, Lawrence/Mt. Blue, Winthrop/Livermore Falls. Next week, though, the big games, featuring Yarmouth/Lisbon, Leavitt/Waterville and Dirigo/Oak Hill, will be played under the (hopefully) clear blue sky.

Given my druthers, I’ll take the Saturday games any day and twice on Sunday (um, yeah).

Most people I know prefer Friday night football because of all of the trappings. I think part of it has to do with where and when you went to high school, too. Nostalgia is the social lubricant of high school football. Just ask Kenny Chesney and Buzz Bissinger.

I went to a Saturday school. There wasn’t really anything glamorous about it. Lake Region played on the equivalent of a 100-yard pitcher’s mound back then. There was dust everywhere. Players wilted in the September sun. The team was sometimes good but usually middle of the pack. Kenny Chesney would be writing treacly paeans to field hockey were he a Laker.

But it was all us little kids in the suburbs of Cumberland County knew.  All of the other teams in what was known as the Triple-C Conference had home games on Saturday afternoons, too, and we grew up playing pick-up games behind the end zone while the big kids butted heads on the real field. You couldn’t play behind the goal posts on a Friday night, even with lights. It would be too dark. Friday nights were for bonfires, as far as we knew.

Although Lake Region has long since built a new field with lights, there are still a few holdovers — Fryeburg and Traip, off the top of my head.

And therein lies part of the problem. There are very few great football schools that still play on Saturday.

In fact, the list pretty much begins and ends with Lisbon. Sure, Thornton Academy is always among the Western A contenders, and Cheverus is perhaps the team to beat in the SMAA this year, but neither has won anything in over 20 years. Neither has Dexter, one of three holdouts in the LTC (perhaps Calais is picking up the torch). A Saturday afternoon game at Winslow used to be an event, but the Black Raiders have fallen on hard times.

For guaranteed, year-in, year-out, buzzworthy Saturday afternoon games, the pickings are pretty slim.

Saturday afternoons have their perks, though. You soak in the sun during the final days of summer early in the season and don’t freeze your rear end off as much late in the season. You don’t have to rush out of work to get a tailgate going. The game ends and you drive home in daylight and you’re home in time for supper, whereas if you’re on the road on a Friday night, you’re lucky to make it home in time to see the highlights on the 11 o’clock news.

Some Friday night schools, such as Oxford Hills, still hold their homecoming games on the traditional Saturday afternoon. Edward Little and Lewiston moved their annual “Battle of the Bridge” back to Saturday afternoon a few years ago to make room for some other game-related festivities.

No doubt, Friday night football has its advantages, too. Everybody loves getting the game out of the way so they have the whole weekend to do as they please. If college football’s your thing, Friday night high school pigskin is a fine appetizer and you’ve got the whole next day to watch Lee Corso try on funny hats.

I’m not going to argue that Friday night isn’t the  of high school football. Many schools gravitated to Friday nights over the last 15 or 20 years because of the crowds are bigger, and that doesn’t just help the gate and concession receipts. Maranacook, thanks to the late Ricky Gibson’s selfless and moving gesture, seems to have had an infusion of enthusiasm for its program since it went under the lights last year.

Some folks will take that a step further and argue that Friday night games have a certain electricity that can’t be matched on Saturday afternoons. I would beg to differ. Some of the most electrifying games ever played were on a Saturday afternoon — last year’s PTC Class B final at Leavitt, the 2002 PTC Class A championship between Lewiston and Edward Little at Walton Field, the 2004 Campbell Conference championship between Livermore Falls and Jay, pretty much every Winthrop home game in 1999.

Friday nights are great with all of their glitz and glory. I’ll take a crisp October afternoon, with the sun low in the sky and the red, orange and yellow trees in the background and some little kids playing a pickup game behind the end zone. That’s football.

All it needs is a cool nickname.