New London — Coast Guard football narratives aren't always merry. There are reasons. Like this could be just the second winning season in the past eight years. There aren't quite 900 cadets on base and 38 percent are women, turning a potential talent pool of football players into a talent puddle.

But, alas, a rant for another day. As the late Alex Simonka, an officer and a coach at the Academy, once said, "It's not like this here every year, but it's like this here this year."

Indeed. And in this case, "like this" means the hovering opportunity for a conference football championship and trip to the NCAA Division III playoffs.

There is a big game — biggest in years — Saturday at Cadet Memorial Field. Coast Guard, with one loss in the New England Football Conference, plays undefeated and 19th-ranked nationally Western New England College. If Coast Guard wins and then does the same at Endicott next week, the football Bears become the Dancing Bears, another tribute to the utterly superior coaching of Bill George and staff.

This much we know about Coast Guard: Now that every high school around here short of Bacon Academy has lights and plays Friday nights, it has become the primary football option on Saturday afternoons. The stadium sits along the Thames River, offering Rockwellian views. There is pageantry with a militaristic zing. They protect the quarterback ... then they protect the rest of us.

And so this is an opportunity for the surrounding communities to support our future protectors in a game the Bears need more desperately than a lung. All tickets are $5. That's cheaper than one of those mocha venti caramel latte macchiato things at Starbucks that used to be known as "coffee."

"We're throwing everything at the wall this week," innovative athletic director Tim Fitzpatrick said Wednesday. "We're doing 'Celebrate New London.' Alumni discounts, faculty and staff appreciation day. We're promoting to local VFWs. We're trying to get everybody we can in there."

Celebrate New London is the Academy's collaboration with New London schools to offer an opportunity for elementary and middle school kids a chance to watch a college football game. Fitzpatrick said Coast Guard expects between 800 and 1,000 kids and their families to attend.

"The school system's been great," he said. "They're running buses from the high school and a couple of elementary schools. The band is going to be there. Their band and cheerleaders become the Coast Guard band and cheerleaders for a day. We've picked five kids to be 'kickoff kids' to run out and get their name announced and they get to spend the game on the sidelines."

Opinions will vary in and out of the Academy about football's place on the base. Free country. Just send up a flare the next time Superintendent James Rendon is doing pushups with the rest of the corps celebrating a correct answer in calculus class. The Day ran a priceless photo of Rendon recently at a football game, doing pushups with the cadets following a touchdown.

"From my time at West Point and now here, I've realized the importance of football in service academy culture," Fitzpatrick said. "With respect to Coast Guard, it's not a coincidence that Cadet Memorial Field sits where it does, in the epicenter of the academy, the geographic middle in terms of its proximity.

"Right, wrong or indifferent," Fitzpatrick said, "football is big in the service academy culture. I didn't do that. It goes way back to West Point with the Heisman trophies and what West Point brought to college football in general. It's the biggest team we have in terms of number of participants. It's special. It's what graduates come back for, what parents come back for. It's a chance five times a year for the Academy to throw its chest out."

This is the best chance for the Bears to win a conference title since the days (2007-08) it had the Division III Flutie, Christian George, the little quarterback who could. Remember Simonka: It's not like this here every year. But it's like this here this year.

"The second 5-win season in four years is significant," Fitzpatrick said. "It shows a real turnaround in the program, largely engineered by the coaches. I've helped some. We've built new offices and provided an emphasis on things maybe that weren't there before. But we have five guys who coach football full time who do a really good job at it."

So worry not about guards at the gate and all the military stuff, folks. Saturday is about football. The road to a championship.

"It's always puzzled me how we've struggled to appeal to the populace," Fitzpatrick said. "New London was just designated an official Coast Guard city, but it was a Coast Guard city long before that. I feel like we need to give sports fans more opportunities to have the academy revealed to them."

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.

Twitter: @BCgenius