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This is an open letter to anyone with any kind of influence in the scheduling of high school football in Montana.

Please, let us watch both football teams form Butte High and Butte Central play. I’m not asking for a return of the Butte-Central game because that ship has likely sailed.

We just have to make it so we can all watch both football teams play. The players on the teams want to see the other teams play, too.

On Friday, I went to a Butte Central football game for the first time since the 2022 season opener. Despite the smoke, the extreme winds and a tough loss by the home team, I had a blast watching the Maroons play.

I didn’t go because I have an election coming and I wanted to pretend that I support the local team. I went because I legitimately love watching local sports. After all, for a quarter of a century my job was to write about such events.

One reason I decided to get out of covering local sporting events was because I wanted to watch my own son play sports. That meant this Friday was the only time I wasn’t at Naranche Stadium or on the road with the Bulldogs when Central was playing a home game on Montana Tech’s Bob Green Field.

Butte High played on Thursday night at Missoula Sentinel, so that meant the Bulldogs (and their fans and parents) had the night off to go watch the Maroons play Libby. It is the only time this season that the Maroons played at home on a Friday night in which the Bulldogs were off.

From the first home game of 2022 until Friday marked the longest streak for me missing Butte Central games since the 1970s.

Even when I was away in college, I got the chance to watch the Bulldogs and Maroons play from time to time.

Before I started kindergarten, I was convinced by my parents that I was going to be a Maroon. I even played football as a freshman at BC during Coach Don Peoples Jr.’s first year as head coach in 1989.

I grew up idolizing the football and basketball players from both schools, and at 50 I still follow both teams closely with an eye on the historical significance of their games and seasons.

Seeing the Maroons play for the first time in 25 months was great. It was fun to see that Coach Peoples is still pretty fiery — even 11 months removed from a heart attack that would have killed 99 percent of the population.

I was glad to see that the Maroons still have that fight-to-the-end spirit that helped turn them into a perennial contender despite losing the numbers game to every Class A opponent.

It was fun to see that junior quarterback Ryan Peoples is still the player I remember from Little Guy Football. Most players have a couple — or maybe a handful — of touchdown runs when they dive for the pylon in their career. Ryan had at least two per game when he was in the fourth grade.

His dives were always a thing of beauty, and his dad used to chalk them up to Ryan watching too much television or playing too many video games.

I also looked forward to seeing some of the boys who I know from baseball in action. I’m talking about guys like Aiden Ossello, Keltan “Stewie” Kean, Tony Stajcar, Marquis Abad, J.J. Taylor, Gunnar “Goo” O’Brien, Brennan “Monkey” Lester and Jack Nylund.

I looked forward to seeing some of the players I refereed in subvarsity basketball. Guys like Coy Campbell, Jaxon Hiatt, GG Fantini, Justus McGee and some of the players I mentioned earlier.

I wanted to see Jack Nagle play after his strong start to the season. Unfortunately, I missed some of those guys because they were injured.

I know some of the players from Butte High want to see the Maroons play. That goes both ways, too.

The Bulldogs and Maroons are, after all, mostly friends.

Also, for about the first 100 years or so of Butte High and Butte Central football, the Bulldogs and Maroons had the chance to watch each other play at least a handful of times each season.

They also got to play each other.

Because they shared Naranche Stadium and then Bulldog Memorial Stadium, the Maroons used to play home games on Saturday night when Butte High played home games on Friday.

The crowds of those games were usually filled with players from the other school. You saw that last year, too, during the divisional and State basketball tournaments in town. Maroons cheered for Bulldogs and Bulldogs cheered for Maroons.

It really was a great sight.

So many people in and around Butte also want to cheer for both teams. In Butte, we care more about high school sports than most places, yet we shut out our community from half of the football games.

Fans in Missoula get to watch the home games from all three Class AA teams because they share a field. The same can be said for Class AA teams in Billings.

In Butte, though, we are forced to pick one or the other.

Other sports are different because a team might play two or three basketball games in a week. The same goes for volleyball, soccer and baseball. If you miss a game in those sports, you can catch up with the next one.

In football, the teams play once a week.

The answer to this dilemma is not to have the Maroons play on Saturday night when both teams have home games on the same week, though I could certainly live with that. What we need to do is start having some doubleheaders on Friday nights.

Ideally, both teams would play at Naranche Stadium again, but that is not likely. While Naranche is the coolest high school football stadium in the state, BC has established a nice home tradition at Alumni Coliseum.

Alumni has a newer turf than Naranche. It was put in this summer. Alumni also has a giant television screen for BC’s pregame video, and every speaker in the stadium works, unlike at Naranche.

The Maroons get to sell their own concessions at their home games now that they play at Montana Tech, and Alumni has a luxury box that I snuck into to get out of the wind on Friday.

We could still play a doubleheader using the two stadiums that are about a mile apart, however. Central could play at 4:30 p.m. at Tech, and Butte High could play at 8 at Naranche. Or maybe 4 and 7:30, and we can reverse the order from time to time.

We could also schedule more Thursday night games — something that might be inevitable with the rapid rate we are running off youth sports officials — so we could see both teams play. The players love having the spotlight on a Thursday night.

Whichever way they do it, they just have to make sure that we can watch both teams play football again. The fans deserve it. More importantly, the players from both teams deserve to be put on the big stage.

Missing BC games has been so disheartening these past three seasons, and simply watching the games later on the NFHS network isn’t enough.

You really need to be there in person to truly appreciate Ryan Peoples diving for that pylon.

— Bill Foley, who never dove for the pylon to score a touchdown, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.