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Rick Strunk was in his office Thursday trying to put together a news release for the soccer playoffs, and the phone kept ringing. It's that time of year.

The associate executive director of the N.C. High School Athletics Association has been taking calls all week, and it hasn't been about soccer. Tonight, at the end of a long week of the usual proportions, the high school football playoffs will start across the state and autumn will proceed accordingly.

This rite of fall, not the finals but the first round, is one of the great nights to be a North Carolinian. Across the state tonight, off the highways and the backroads behind the schoolyards in the big cities and the tiny towns, the lights will cut through the fog and through the years and we'll celebrate the passage of time the way we always have on this annual weekend.

Strunk could breathe a little easier Thursday when he picked up the phone and it was only me and not some screaming football coach complaining about having to travel all the way across North Carolina just so he could play a juggernaut named Dudley or Ragsdale or Thomasville or Reidsville.

"Anything for the fourth estate," Strunk said as if he really meant it.

He'd been through a lot this week, a week that began last Saturday morning when the reports from all the conferences from across the state began coming in and he soon realized that five of them were just wrong, and the seeding process that generally takes several hours anyway would stretch to something like nine hours.

And even then, he had to go back and make sure it was all correct; his staff tired of re-doing the entire 4-A bracket because one school reported its record at 5-5 when it was really 4-6, tired of the box of tennis balls with the numbers written on them, tired of the calls about the Web site, which had been doubled in capacity since last year only to buckle under the strain of 800,000 hits that required still another system overhaul.

"It's just a big, mammoth, gargantuan task," Strunk said.

And then the phone calls started.

This is a great night for high school football fans and high school football players and high school football parents, but it's a terrible night for high school football coaches. This whole week is really too much for most of them, what with the playoffs starting and unscouted teams from uncharted territories busing in for games that will prolong or end seasons and careers. So many of them got on the phones this week and called Strunk or one of the other staff members at the NCHSAA complaining about seedings or tiebreakers or brackets or travel plans.

"We're a member-driven organization," Stunk said. "We do what the members want us to do."

He was talking about the playoff structure, of course, because the truth is once the seeding process begins, the NCHSAA sure doesn't do what the members want. Everything at that point has been done. The records and the strength of schedule and the classifications determine almost everything, and tennis balls and coin tosses determine the rest.

"The main thing we heard this week was the travel," Strunk said. "Coaches have to understand this is the way it is now because of the playoff structure they voted for."

It's a system that invites darn near everybody and awards two titles for each class and sometimes produces travel problems and often produces blowouts and sometimes produces games they talk about for the rest of their lives.

"They'll play the games," Strunk said. "And I predict there will be some blowouts and there will be some close games. Everything will play out as the playoffs continue."

In other words, it's out of everyone's hands now. From here on it's up to the coaches and the players, and we'll just have to wait and hope Dudley plays Ragsdale down the road and East Forsyth plays Independence and Murphy survives to play Thomasville. The classic games are all on paper now, and the roads to the titles wind all through the Triad and the Triangle and Metrolina and the Outer Banks and the Smokies and all the towns in between.

Everything's drawn up just for those games, the regional battles and the old rivalries and the clash of historic programs that play maybe once a generation. A week ago, nothing was determined. Strunk and the NCHSAA members hunkered down in the office on Finley Golf Course Road and awaited the returns.

"It was like election central," he said. "We were all waiting here for all the precincts to report, then had to wait a little longer for the outlying areas and then we had to sort it all out."

And then the phones started ringing, and they rang all week, and they were still ringing Thursday when Strunk sat down at his desk and finally began working on a soccer release that paled in comparison to the work that had to be done before.

At the NCHSAA, though, all sports are equal. Football just seems to take on a life of its own. Especially this night, the best night of all for high school sports.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com