And so winter sports practices for high school athletes began Monday, except for about 1,200 kids across Connecticut.

Whoa, you say. Twelve-hundred kids? Exaggerate much?

Not that much. Figure it this way: There are 32 high school football teams awaiting Saturday's 16 state semifinal games. If we assume an average of 40 kids dress for each team, that's 1,200 potential winter sports athletes whose seasons are delayed, and whose coaches and teammates must do without.

Clearly, all 1,200 don't play a winter sport. Can we assume it's half? A third? It's still an appreciable number.

And it's got to stop.

Because even those of us who like high school football should submit there's a problem that goes beyond fairness to winter sports. It's laughable to think that football players whose seasons will end Saturday or the following Saturday in the finals will be physically (let alone mentally) ready to begin another sport with zero rest.

Take, for example, Ledyard. If the Colonels make the football finals Dec. 12 or 13, a half-dozen basketball players (perhaps as many as three starters), not to mention some wrestlers, will have missed two weeks of winter practice. And would take up a new sport with one day of rest between seasons.

One day.

Since when is it permissible to endure three months of football and then get thrown around a wrestling mat a day later? It's neither smart nor safe. And yet we allow it.

I asked two football players from Waterford, whose season ended last Thursday, how they felt after Monday's first basketball practice.

"It's more like what doesn't hurt," senior guard Isaiah Jones said. "My hip, my lower back, my shoulder … "

Teammate Jake Mangual, Waterford's quarterback, chimed in, "my ribs, hips, feet, legs, back … "

Yet they were out there on the court Monday, excited for the basketball season, hopeful the Lancers can exceed their run to the state semifinals last March.

It's here we call a 20-second timeout to remind the "back when I was a kid" crowd to keep it moving. You know:

"Back when I was a kid, we played football all day, basketball all night and wrestled grizzly bears on the way to school," they say, while we await their noses to start growing.

It's not 1952 anymore. Three months of football require more than a day or two of rest before the next season begins. There is no debate.

Is there a solution? You bet your sweet ascot there is. Get rid of Thanksgiving Day football. It would allow the playoffs to begin sooner and seasons to end quicker, thereby giving winter sports the same considerations as football. Like having all their kids for the entire season.

Think about it: When do football coaches deal with what basketball and wrestling coaches do? Here's the answer: Never. That's when.

"We have a couple of really good players in the gym right now and hopefully they can carry us until the other guys get going," Ledyard boys' basketball coach Dave Cornish said Monday. "If we didn't have such good players, now we're in trouble if our best athletes and players are on the football field. We'd have to schedule (an opening) game later that what we have right now (Dec. 18)."

Now I get that the mere suggestion of ending Thanksgiving Day football would be dismissed like a caller to Mike Francesa. They'll yell "tradition!" louder than Tevye did in "Fiddler on the Roof." I ask: Is your tradition more important than sending physically compromised kids to the playing field and wrestling mats? This is not a question of toughness, either. Ask yourself: Would you want to imperil your kid's health?

Thanksgiving Day football is, in most outposts of Connecticut, completely weather dependent. If it's a nice day, people come. If it's not, they stay home. Nobody's breathing into brown paper bags over the outcome. And yet some breathless conventionalists would have you believing Thanksgiving football is the 11th Commandment.

I've heard athletic directors, too, bark about the importance of the gate at Thanksgiving games. Let me ask: What happens when it rains and nobody shows? A telethon to raise money for the rest of the year?

Stop.

The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the state's governing body for high school athletics, has approved new start dates for the 2015-16 and 16-17 basketball seasons. The girls will start the Monday after Thanksgiving and boys begin the second Saturday after Thanksgiving. At least that gives some football kids a few more days of rest.

But when will football have some make some concessions? Lest we forget, basketball is the CIAC's moneymaker now, packing the rent-free Mohegan Sun Arena. It's time for a new tradition here in Connecticut. Thanksgiving football isn't more important than common sense.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.

Twitter: @BCgenius