Go Rovers!

My hometown high school football team will be playing their cross-river rival tomorrow morning for the 100th time. The Easton (PA) Red Rovers will play the Phillipsburg (NJ) Sateliners tomorrow morning and the game will be broadcast live on ESPN2 starting at 6AM PST (9AM EST).

Apparently this is quite an event in the area, especially after this story in today's USAToday.

The Easton Red Rovers and Phillipsburg (N.J.) Stateliners will play football for the 100th time Thanksgiving morning. The outcome will determine the mood for turkey dinner — and bragging rights for the rest of the seniors' lives.

The high schools represent old mill towns separated by a river and a rivalry. One is spanned by bridges, the other by generations.

"We're blue-collar cities with the same values and traditions," Easton coach Steve Shiffert says. "If not for the Delaware River, we'd be the same place."

"We're like one big city in two separate states," Phillipsburg coach Bob Stem says. "You want to win so bad because you have to live with these people."

And, in many cases, sleep with them. Stem is P-burg '58. His wife, Janice, is Easton '56. "Bob is the reason we lost my senior year," she says of the 1955 game, when Stem blocked an extra point in a 7-6 Phillipsburg win. "He made me cry."

The centenary game is making news beyond the Lehigh Valley: It airs on ESPN2 at 9 a.m. ET Thursday, one of hundreds of traditional high school games played across the USA on Thanksgiving, mainly in the Northeast. There are fewer of these turkey bowls played than years ago. Many rivalries have been moved off the day so as not to interfere with state playoffs, according to Bob Kanaby, executive director of the National Association of State High School Associations.

Easton and Phillipsburg officials say they'll never move their game. "It's who we are," Shiffert says. The game interrupts playoffs for both — and it's worse for Easton:

•Phillipsburg (10-0) is shooting for consecutive undefeated seasons and New Jersey sectional championships. The Liners beat Union 42-20 on Friday and will play Elizabeth in a sectional final Dec. 1 at Rutgers. "Don't get me wrong, it's a nice title to have," Stem says. "But (beating) Easton is more important by far."

•Easton (11-1) beat Parkland 17-15 on Friday on a 36-yard field goal with 2.7 seconds left in the Pennsylvania playoffs. On Saturday, the Rovers play Liberty, the only team to beat them this season; the winner advances to a state quarterfinal.

That means Easton will play twice in three days. Other coaches "think I'm crazy," Shiffert says. "We make no excuses. We chose this path."

Easton has taken the path twice before. In 2003, the Rovers lost to Phillipsburg and lost again in the playoffs two days later. In 2004, they beat Phillipsburg and won again in the playoffs two days later, before losing a week after that.

How will the Rovers practice for two teams in one week? They won't. "You practice for Phillipsburg," Shiffert says. "Friday we'll look at video of Liberty and loosen up. But we won't get on the field."

Both are perennial powers

The hoo-ha is equal parts cottage industry (T-shirts, calendars, medallions), festival (bonfires, fireworks, parades) and football game (Easton leads the series 54-40-5).

This photo of the two teams was taken on the "old bridge" separating the two towns - a bridge with which your author is familiar having grown up in Pennsylvania decades ago when the legal drinking age was 21 in Pennsylvania but only 18 across the river in New Jersey (memories of Ida's Hole in the Wall are hazy, but still retrievable).

Your author also put on a Red Rovers uniform through his junior year, but being small and slow with little heart, it just wasn't to be.