Norwich — At 1:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, all was right again. Toe hit football. Game underway. The kids doing their thing.

We might have forgotten in the past few days, what with all the blustering and blathering, that this was a simple high school football game. Of the kids, for the kids and by the kids. And when toe hit ball for the first time, all the lies, false narratives, posturing and other adult inconveniences became a duller ache.

When it was over, this season that beats all at NFA lived on, division champs in the Eastern Connecticut Conference, all the way to the state playoffs and likely a daunting date with Darien.

There have been teams with better records in NFA lore and legend. Just never one that ever taught its participants — and the rest of us — more enduring lessons.

Sometimes, sports morph into cliché festivals, all that stuff about overcoming adversity and never giving up sounding like sound bites and bromides. Except that if you pay attention to kids today — specifically their alarming inability to cope with hardship and failure — you realize sports' ability to help fortify lessons of resilience becomes more important than a lung.

And this wondrous football season at NFA has given its kids a blueprint to live all the days of their life, in homage to Jimmy V: Don't give up. Don't ever give up.

The Wildcats were 3-3 not too long ago, smarting from a last-second loss to Fairfield Prep. The playoffs felt more remote than Calcutta. The game after at Fitch? Down eight in the fourth quarter. The game after vs. Killingly? Down eight with 2:48 left. The game after at Bacon Academy? Down seven with a minute left, facing a fourth-and-20. With their third string quarterback.

They won 'em all.

Because they listened to their coach, Jason Bakoulis, who keeps telling them one rep (repetition) at a time. Nothing more, nothing less.

"What I've learned this year," tougher-than-Clorox linebacker Nate Cote said Wednesday, "is that whatever happens to you, you keep pushing and keep working through it. Whatever hand you're dealt, you keep going. That's what the coaches teach us. Take what you are given in life, the classroom, anything. Learn from it and keep going. Just keep going."

Cote said all this the last time he'd step on his home field for a game. It was after NFA's 49-12 win over New London before 1,605 fans who all arrived and departed safely, thanks to the good work of police departments from two cities and NFA's security personnel.

Their diligence allowed the game to be played without incident and ultimately, for NFA's allegory to be told. NFA's story of 2019 needs to be told. Kids (and the adults in their lives) could learn from it. Because this just in: Manure occureth in everybody's life. On everybody's team. And look what happens when you just keep going.

"This season taught me to never give up. Always look forward to the future," senior Nolan Molkenthin said. "There was never quit in any of our guys whether we were 2-0, 3-3, with our first quarterback or our third. Just came to every practice with the same plan. All we had on our minds is to never quit.

"After the Fairfield Prep game, there were some heads down. Coach told us there's still a slim chance at the playoffs. Our playoffs started after that game. Everything happened in our favor because we never quit. Look at us now."

Look at them indeed.

"These kids teach me stuff every day," Bakoulis said. "The biggest thing as a coach, you come in with a philosophy. One rep at a time. But the kids have shown it. You can say it. But if they don't do it, you have nothing. Just words. These kids just keep showing me fight. It's a credit to the seniors and their fight mentality. The ability to fight through adversity. I am very fortunate to be here with them. All of them."

The lessons of NFA football, 2019, are among the most powerful that are taught in sports. Nobody knows why the universe picked this group and this time to be the beacons. But they are. They head to Darien (or possibly Newtown) now on the wings of a spirit that will never leave them.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro