You often don’t know what you have until it is gone.

That is true for many things and in many instances, but particularly so in prep sports. That leads soon to be old timers like me who are not far enough removed from their playing days — though half a lifetime away by now — to hold ourselves back from reminiscing with those who in their heyday about what it used to be like when we were playing.

We utter things like “I could have scored that touchdown if only….” or “I had that big sack to take us into overtime, but we still lost.” It is not often we reflect during that moment in our lives and truly appreciate it at the time, but more often later when the moment is long gone.

For many kids, sports has always been there, like a drumbeat in their lives. T-ball at age 5, to basketball at around 9 years old into peewee football. It is just one of those things the youth take for granted, such as mom’s good cooking, until it is no longer there.

In these few pages each week we mostly extol the virtue of organized athletics. We hold high our local heroes and celebrate the wins while absorbing the humbling blow of the inevitable loss. The athletic careers of many of our high school kids are over within a few years, a handful go into college and only a minute number make it anywhere near the pros.

Only at exceptional times do sporting events as a whole shut down, such as was the case 10 years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck the area.

St. John the Baptist Parish was thankfully saved by and large, but the storm disrupted the whole area.

L’OBSERVATEUR’s edition on Aug. 27, 2005, was very sedate. In the coverage from that week’s jamboree football games, much like this week, there was no indication of the hurricane brewing in the Gulf that would devastate New Orleans and send droves of people through St. John. It was just the regular preseason coverage of who scored what and what teams need to improve before the regular season.

And then nothing for a week. L’OBSERVATUER uncharacteristically missed its next publication date and didn’t come out again until Sept. 5 — which should have been opening week for prep and college football — this time with no sports at all. Let us just say it takes something of that magnitude to stop the steamroller that is St. John the Baptist Parish football. But sports were the last thing to be thought of while the lives of so many were in turmoil.

It wasn’t until the second week of September that opening week occurred for some local football teams — others were not so lucky. The Wednesday Sept. 14 edition revealed a 23-20 Riverside win over H.L. Bourgeois, a Hahnville 43-7 victory over Terrebonne and a St. James 28-7 win over Terrebonne. That is when things began to take on a little bit of normalcy for the first time in a few weeks, though a long way away from recovering from the devastation.

Then St. James head coach Rick Gaille expressed why the team did not hold off longer to start the season.

“It’s what we do,” Gaille said. “Football players play football, and coaches coach.”

It is a core statement as simple as that which reminds who we are, the time we have together, how easily and quickly our lives can change and why we should appreciate what we have when we have it.

Kyle Barnett can be reached by phone at 985-652-9545 or email at kyle.barnett@lobservateur.com.