FORT WAYNE – Fifty years of this now, out here where a sea of August corn laps gently against 100 yards of August grass. Fifty years of whistles shrieking and pads clattering, of foot meeting ball with a muffled schloomph, of voices going up to the hot blue sky.

“Right there!” the voices say. And, “Now go! Now go!”

And then the buffalo sound of 11 kids thundering downfield to cover a kick. And the shriek of whistles again. And the voices again.

“Excellent!” they shout.

The word drifts, it echoes, it comes at you from 2010 or 1990 or 1970, all those years that are in play again at Woodlan High School now that the football has turned 50 there.

“You know when you look back a little bit, I guess 50 years, the exact 50, kind of snuck up on a bunch of us a little bit,” says Barry Ehle, the head coach who was once one of Leland Etzler’s assistants and, back when the world was young, a player for him, too. “We measure things a little bit with Leland’s tenure as head coach. We knew he was in it for a long time. But then you just kind of thought ‘OK, he’s retired and it’s someone else’s turn,’ and we didn’t think about the rest of that history.”

And now they do, because 50 is a number that tends to head-slap your perspective. You talk 50 years of football out here, you start with Etzler, who was the head coach from 1965 to 2004. And then you start thinking about all the boys who wore the navy-and-white for him, boys who grew up here and came back and whose sons and cousins and nephews line the home sideline now every Friday night.

You get this anywhere football matters, of course, and it matters in a lot of places. But maybe it doesn’t hit you quite as obviously as it does in a place like Woodlan, where the high school and its community are so inseparably wedded, and something like high school football leaves a mark that never quite rubs off.

“We do a thing during the year where we have a parent locker room,” says Ehle, who played on Woodlan’s grandest team, the 1981 unit that lost by a skinny point in the state finals. “We bring them in for the pregame. And as we’re talking, (the dads) are kind of wobbling back and forth. Their heads are bobbing up and down like ‘Yeah.’

“It all comes flooding back to them.”

There’ll be a lot of that going around Sept. 17, when Woodlan plans to celebrate its half-century of football. Etzler’s trying to round up as many former players, coaches, cheerleaders, student managers and administrators as possible to fill Etzler Field that night, and if they all show up they’ll be 2,000 or so strong.

Decade by decade, they’ll all be introduced. Decade by decade, they’ll look down there and, yes, the memories will come in a flood: that winning drive, that championship season, even the very first year – when a one-time defensive end for Alabama, hired as a basketball coach, convinced the school board all those beefy kids on his hoops squad might look good on a football field.

“I don’t think we played any games the first year, just had a scrimmage game (against Payne, Ohio),” recalls Hurl Ivy, the aforementioned basketball coach. “We had kids who didn’t know anything about centering. We were lucky if we had a kid who could throw spot passes 10 yards.”

And now, 50 years later?

The whistles shriek. The pads clatter. The voices rise up to the sky, joining all those other voices across all those Friday nights.

“Excellent!” they shout.

Indeed.