Life really wouldn't be worth livin' if you didn't have a high school football team to support."
-- From "Friday Night Lights," the best-selling book (recently made into a movie) about football in the late 1980s at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas.
It's 15 minutes before kickoff -- the last regular-season home game, against San Clemente -- and Friday night lights are shining brightly on the Mission Viejo High School football team. The jammed school lot forces people to park on residential streets and hike blocks to the stadium, where all 5,000 seats on Mission Viejo's side soon will be filled.
"Food, fun, football -- Diablo style -- after the game at Gini Garner's," says easy-on-the-ears public address announcer Harvey Ohman. Garner, it turns out, is a longtime booster who hosts an annual "meet the coaches" gathering. One hundred forty people showed up this year.
If this all sounds more like football-nutty West Texas than Orange County, there's a reason: This isn't an ordinary high school team. On this evening, Mission Viejo would polish off San Clemente 48-0 and then, last Thursday, complete its fourth straight undefeated regular season by beating Dana Hills 42-10. The Diablos won CIF sectional championships in 2001 and 2002 (runner-up in 2003) and currently are considered the best team in California and ranked No. 3 in the nation by USA Today.
Those are Permian-style credentials, the kind of success that could bind a town and spawn communitywide football mania.
Except that ... Mission Viejo isn't Odessa.
Perhaps more to the point, Orange County and Southern California aren't West Texas. For people with large sports menus on the local table (think Lakers, Angels, Dodgers, USC, UCLA) and everything under the sun to do with their spare time, is it reasonable to expect that even a nationally ranked team can be on the lips of everyone in town?
The answer in Mission Viejo is no, despite Gini Garner's insisting to me that "We are our own mini-Texas" and that the team's success affects the community's morale. "Everyone in town says, 'See you at the game,' " she says.
Not exactly.
On the night I watched the Diablos clobber San Clemente, I made a side trip down the street to a service station and told night clerk Ruben Fernandez that the No. 3 team in the country was playing a long spiral away from where he was standing. "Oh, really?" he says, genuinely surprised. He likes sports, he says, and follows the Lakers and Dodgers.
