Ledyard — No other sporting marriage — not basketball coach/point guard, pitcher/manager — compares to the football coach and his quarterback. Their fates and legacies, fair or not, are linked like the stars and stripes.

And then there’s Mark Farnsworth and Max Ebdon, the coach and quarterback entrusted with maintaining the annual excellence at Ledyard High School. That’s hard enough. Now add a dose of dealing with The Other Guy.

For Farnsworth: He steps into the job vacated by new assistant principal and athletic director Jim Buonocore, an ultra-successful coach who was did the playoffs as habit.

For Ebdon: He’s playing the same position as his brother, Ty, a June 2016 grad, who led the Colonels to three straight playoff appearances.

The Colonels are 0-2 heading to tonight’s game with Bacon Academy, the team they beat in the Class M quarterfinals 10 months ago. How times have changed.

Coach and quarterback are learning that sometimes you have to shake off a little seaweed before you get into the open waters.

“It’s tough to fill in after Ty. Pretty tough,” Max Ebdon said before Thursday’s practice. “Coach Farnsworth and I both have to fill shoes. I get pressed by my family all the time. I haven’t been performing as well as Ty has. You’ve just got to get used to it.”

Farnsworth, meanwhile, is learning that coaching is about the zillion little details nobody ever sees. How it’s way different to “suggest” than “decide.” How Sunday afternoons during football season aren’t spent munching cheese puffs watching the Giants. A long day of game planning.

“Jim said when we were discussing things in the spring that there are things he did we never knew about,” Farnsworth said. “He was right. It’s pretty much nonstop. But that part hasn’t discouraged me.”

Nor should it. The calendar still says September. Plenty of season left. A difficult part of the schedule — Cranston East, St. Joseph — is in the rear view mirror. But there’s still the matter of tonight. The 0-2 record. Eyes of a discerning home crowd. The stomach-turning possibility of 0-3. And all those comparisons.

Farnsworth is no Buonocore.

Max isn’t his brother.

So much for the innocence of high school sports.

“There’s not as much yelling,” Ebdon said, alluding to the difference between playing for Farnsworth over Buonocore. “No one’s on you 24/7. It’s good and bad at the same time. … I miss (Buonocore) but at the same time I like change. We had a lot more scheming with Buonocore. Farnsworth is more heads up football. You’ve got to do your job. With Buonocore, it was more scheming. You had to know what you were doing.”

And so maybe it’s good that the opponent is Bacon. Maybe Ledyard doesn’t have the rivalry with Bacon that it does New London or NFA. But the rivalry is there. Bacon defeated Ledyard during the regular season last year for the first time, likely costing Ledyard another home game in the playoffs. Ledyard returned the favor in the playoffs.

And during basketball, when Ledyard and Bacon played, some Ledyard students brought shirts and signs that read “55-6,” the score by which the Colonels won the playoff game.

“It probably goes back a couple of years,” Farnsworth said. “Bacon is a proud program. Their kids took it to us in the (summer) passing league championship. Our kids want to come out and make sure we do the right thing.”

Max Ebdon, despite the thumping in the playoffs, said Thursday that when he hears “Bacon Academy” he remembers one thing.

"That loss," he said. “That one warm Saturday. Didn’t like it. You remember losses over the wins. We haven’t had that many in the last couple of years here.”

They’d sure like to avoid them for the rest of the season, too. It can start tonight.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro