This column in the Daily News got me thinking about some glory-days stuff:

In 10 years of playing organized football, I played for a lot of bad teams. Outside of one notable blip in eighth grade, every single club was somewhere between crappy and downright terrible.

And perhaps none sucked as much as my high school team in my junior year. Our starting quarterback broke his arm two weeks before practices began in a drunken backyard incident. Our backup quarterback struggled with ankle problems all season. Multiple players missed multiple games with legal troubles. The average weight of our offensive linemen was probably around 175 pounds. We had a few decent players, but holes pretty much everywhere.

We finished the year 1-7, our only win coming against perennial conference patsy West Hempstead. But it almost wasn’t that way. We were quite nearly 2-6.

Some odd Saturday in the middle of the season we were scheduled to play New Hyde Park. The Gladiators, as they were known, never quite pulled out a conference or Long Island-championship in those years, but we could never figure out why. Every season they embarrassed us, even more than we were normally embarrassed.

We were playing at home that afternoon, and we were warming up in a light drizzle when the New Hyde Park team filed off the school bus.

They were, to a man, tremendous. Later, players on our team would half-joke that the district must have been distributing steroids. Every single dude was like 6’2″ and 220 pounds, and most of them had their jerseys tucked up under their shoulder pads to show off their six-pack abs. Oh, and most of them had dark visors and sported neck-roll pads, which never seemed to really protect against anything but served to make already frightening dudes look intimidating as hell.

The drizzle turned to hard rain and eventually a full-on downpour, so our coaches led us back into the locker room to dry off and get focused in the 20 minutes before game time. The room, in the dark basement of the school, reeked of 40 years worth of sweat spilled mostly in vain. We sat on long benches and spoke in hushed tones. Everyone was drenched. A couple guys were visibly terrified.

As the storm continued, our head coach went out to meet with the referees and opposing coaches to discuss the conditions. In the meantime, the assistant coach emerged from his office to address us.

He spoke for about 15 minutes straight, and I can’t now remember a word he said. All I know is this: It was the most inspiring and perhaps very best motivational speech of all time. Honestly. Dude made Patton look like Ben Stein.

There must have been stuff in there about the rain and our pride and our home field and all the stuff that gets high-school football types fired up. It built in a slow crescendo, coach yelling about what we were about to do to them and how we were going to do it. Even those few terrified scrubs started looking mean, determined, excited.

He ended abruptly and told us to line up by the locker room door to march out to the field together. I remember standing there in electric silence with my heart racing, feeling as connected to my teammates as I could ever be to anyone at that age. Every guy in line knew we were about to walk out on the field and promptly beat the piss out of the biggest, baddest team in the conference.

We could hear the rain splashing outside as we prepared to file out. Finally the door swung open.

Our soaked head coach stood in the doorway.

“Game’s canceled, boys.”

New Hyde Park came back on Monday afternoon and beat us handily.