Farrington’s Skippa Diaz Stadium is easy enough to find.

You just turn right at the new theater that had its roof collapse in 2012 and park when you get to the dilapidated swimming pool that hasn’t been used since 1998 but still stands to honor Farrington’s 19 casualties during World War II.

Once you clear the fence, though, it seems that nothing matters. The green plastic grass, the freeway and Diamond Head looming over the city can mean only one thing: King Football is back.

The prep season started Friday, to be followed by Da Braddahhood giving it the old college try and the NFL on my boss’s television 18 hours a day.

The country makes the gladiator sport a priority. Heart surgeons look up at UH football coach Timmy Chang’s annual salary, and it is the same in the lesser 49 states, where the football coach is the highest-paid state employee. Football is so important to one of our highest institutes of learning that the campus will be closed to students when Stanford visits for the home opener. These are the same students who are forced to pay the school $50 a semester so their brethren on scholarship can help entertain the state.

And it is certainly entertaining. I watch it through my fingers the same way I take in boxing. Such skill and athleticism on display, but at least once a contest you hope and pray that someone like Damien’s Brayden Taum will get up after being knocked out trying to keep his team from suffering the indignity of allowing another six points. In this case, he rose and celebrated his stop like it was all that matters and there was an audible sigh throughout the full stands. It doesn’t always work out so well, and when it doesn’t there won’t be an ambulance on site, but that is another conversation.

For me, football is best on the high school level, and this year will be even more compelling with Kahuku challenging the world and the public schools having an advantage over the private schools.

That’s right, I said it. After 100 years, the worm may have turned.

The OIA has found a way to level the playing field. Thanks to the sudden ability to openly transfer between schools, Waipahu reloaded with nine transfers and Kahuku also added on. Sure, ILH powers still recruit talent into their system, but the OIA can counter with the quick fix.

The R word has loomed over the game forever, as early as the turn of the 20th century, when Punahou and Kamehameha voted in a rule to prevent McKinley from suiting up its two best players because they weren’t enrolled on the first day of the school year. Schools still argued over recruiting advantages until the public schools had enough and left the ILH in 1970 and set up the Oahu Prep Bowl in 1973. Six years later, Boyd Yap left Kamehameha to play his senior season for Ron Lee at Kaiser and won it all. Not long after, Cal Lee built the Saint Louis dynasty and here we are.

I am fine with the new transfer portal and always have been. From Rich Miano’s Oahu all-star team at Kaiser to nearly an entire offensive line going from Aiea to Mililani and Wendell Say being victimized again this year, you have to play the game. The kids always think the grass is greener on the other side, and sometimes it actually is. Sometimes.

While colleges have the gall to lie to themselves that their superior academic programs and facilities bring talent to town, prep coaches and players are not trying to sugarcoat anything. It is mostly about football and what kind of stories you want to be able to tell in your garage down the line.

Moving from Saint Louis to Farrington or Punahou to Kahuku can save some parents a bunch of money and allow a kid to play with their neighbor, but few are going to try to insult your intelligence by suggesting it is a step up academically. Not in Hawaii.

If facilities mattered like they do in college, Kapolei and its lush green grass would never lose a game, Waianae could boast of unofficial lunch hours on the beach and Farrington could ask kids to imagine the pool replaced by a planned new gymnasium and band room.

The football field was built first, and that’s all that really matters.

Reach Jerry Campany at jcampany @staradvertiser.com.