For all the nay-saying and negative news pouring out of Michigan these days, there's still a lot to brag about in our state. We still have the charter game of the marquee weekend in pro football's regular season with the Thanksgiving Day matinee. Yes, the Detroit Lions haven't been compelling theater in nearly three consecutive presidential terms, but I'll address that later.

Following the annual Turkey Day game, the Michigan High School Athletic Association holds it's yearly football finals at Ford Field, another Michigan tradition since the mid-to-late 1970s at the Pontiac Silverdome. There was a tremendous crowd for yesterday's Lake Orion - Rockford matchup, the gold stamp contest among eight different championship games over Friday and Saturday. I would guesstimate the assembled masses at near 20,000 for the Division I final, and I'm surprised it wasn't significantly more.

I'm surprised because we've all heard so much about our dying economy's terrifying effects of the last nearly two years. There's thousands of houses in foreclosure, jobs literally evaporating, credit virtually impossible to secure, the list is endless. Yet the Lions, at 0-11 and practically begging for people to buy tickets, get a sellout on Thanksgiving at over $40 a ticket and parking around the stadium going for $50 a car. The MHSAA? Despite the great turnout, they still had seats to spare in the endzones of the lower bowl in Ford Field. For the cost of a $10 ticket, a fan gets four games and parking locked in at $6 per car at a handful of lots, making the day-long experience of four games at Ford Field less than dinner for two at a coney island.

I'm very surprised that more fans don't take advantage of the incredible value that is the MHSAA football finals. Yes, this is a Lions town and Detroit fans have supported their team in even the most head-turning times (for example, this year, right?), so that much I understand. It's this loyalty that makes Detroit one of the nation's great sports towns.

I've sometimes been critical of the MHSAA, like many coaches, administrators, fans and fellow officials have been on many different issues. That's life. Sometimes my writing and refereeing is seen as dead-on and other times it's viewed with a less complimentary eye. After two years of attending the football finals in two different capacities, I'm floored at how effective a small army of dedicated athletic administrators, aka the MHSAA, are at transforming a mammoth, 65,000-seat facility that earned a SuperBowl and a Final Four into an incredible experience for 16 competing schools and all the marching bands, cheer squads, pom-pon teams and dance corps that accompany the championship teams. The MHSAA is to be applauded for that.

Last year I volunteered as a down box linesman for two of the eight games, and this year I covered the Lake Orion - Rockford matchup for The Oakland Press. You can read my championship game sidebar story that ran in today's edition here, and the Lake Orion - Dearborn Fordson retrospective that ran last week is linked here. I've often wondered aloud why the MHSAA doesn't share it's championship experience with a greater pool of officials, and the MHSAA has begun to address this very issue in a more proactive manner. Yet after this weekend, I can say with absolute conviction that Michigan's football finals is an incredible experience in a mesmerizing venue and it's something anyone associated with prep football should support in earnest. That might mean pushing hard to earn a finals assignment as a contest official, or volunteer as an administrator or coach, or simply purchase a few tickets and bring the family.

It's really an incredible undertaking and one that is done for the kids, which makes it all the more remarkable in today's economic climate. There are game site options available to the MHSAA that would be much more cost-friendly than Ford Field. The MHSAA gets no discount to play their championship at the Lions' facility because to Ford Field, it's just another date that could be booked with a different event, and you don't stay in business giving your product away all the time. There's no media discount either -- the cost to hook up to Ford Field's BlueZone internet service on a per day, per reporter basis was $30, the same as a Lions game. Yet the finals continue to be held at the state's premiere facility because our Michigan schools, stocked by Michigan families, expect no less of an experience than the generation before them, and the MHSAA is committed to delivering on that promise.

Our state's communities get a SuperBowl-quality experience in a SuperBowl venue -- and how many prep football fans around the country can say that?

~ T.C. Cameron is writing Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due in August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

As the Detroit Lions continue to stumble towards the finish line of one of the more miserable seasons in their 75-year history, journalists of local and national flavor alike have bantered the possibility of Detroit losing their signature Thanksgiving Day game.

It's never good when the home team loses, loses a lot and loses in a manner that's of an embarrassing nature, week after week, and this subject matter that threatens the viability of the Turkey Day game is a by-product of that losing culture. However, losing this game would be a great injustice for many reasons, but it's a subject rooted in America's ugly side of entitlement more than any other reason. The donut-eaters who fill press boxes at national sporting events feel compelled to tell you that they deserve an amazing, competitive game to cover, write about, televise or report upon every year. Yes, there's truth that the National Football League ought to be concerned at the long stretch of uncompetitive games, seasons and Thanksgiving Day contests the Lions' have played in the last 10 years. At the same time, this game, it's roots and traditions go back to a time when the NFL was struggling to earn a national fan base of any kind, and it leaned on the passionate Detroit football fans in 1934 to begin a rite of passage in America that's survived nearly five generations.

What's also of interest is what was sacrificed in the southeastern Michigan region from the Thumb to the state line in Toledo for this national-televised Thanksgiving Day game. Specifically, many high school and collegiate traditions that were shuttered in the 1950s and 60s, resurrected only when the Lions opened play in the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium, better known as the Silverdome.

Many marquee, signature games within the prep landscape in Michigan were played on Thanksgiving Day. In metro Detroit, Royal Oak High's Acorns and Birmingham High's Maples played 45 times on Turkey Day, starting in 1915 or 1916, the first year of play unconfirmed. It was Royal Oak High's Eva Moore, a counselor at the now-closed school on Washington Avenue, who drummed up the idea for a trophy, a ceramic brown jug. Birmingham end John Sheppard painted the jug red, white and blue to symbolize the school colors of both schools. The Acorns to the south end of Woodward Avenue took 24 wins to Birmingham's 14, while seven games ended in a tie. Royal Oak forfeited the 1925 game but it's '35 squad earned recognition as the state's football champion.

In Saginaw, Arthur Hill High and Saginaw High commenced their spirited rivalry on the famed Thursday day of feast. Former Detroit Tiger broadcaster Paul Carey watched many a game from the sidelines as his father, a long-respected game official, worked the contest as the game's Referee. These games were the staple of the high school season for many years in the Midland-Bay City-Saginaw region. Yes, there's a tradition in 'The Valley' that speaks to basketball prowess but before the hardwood game came to prominence as we know it today, football was king in Saginaw.

The Goodfellows Game at Briggs Stadium pitted the Detroit's Catholic League champion versus the Detroit public school league champion, then known as the Metropolitan League. Often the winner earned distinction in state media polls as the state's title winner. That game ceased in 1967, but it's legacy lives on in the memories of so many former players and coaches.

Today, the Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) stages the championship games of it's annual football tournament on Thanksgiving weekend at Ford Field. From 1983-2002, prep title games were played in one of the only facilities to host a Super Bowl after the Silverdome successfully hosted Super Bowl XVI, still one of the highest-rated Super Bowl in television history. After Detroit successfully hosted Super Bowl XL, the same will be said of every championship game played at Ford Field since 2006.

How many state associations can say that? For what was sacrificed to make the pro game possible here, should our football community have to lose the charter Thanksgiving Day game just because the Lions are lacking in the left side of the win-loss ledger?

These traditions, along with Detroit's Thanksgiving Day parade and NFL football game, were built upon the backbone of Detroit's prep football history and the region's sporting passion. It was WWJ-950 AM that took the initiative of broadcasting the first professional Thanksgiving Day game to a national radio audience, a 19-16 victory that the Chicago Bears took from the Lions at the now-demolished University of Detroit stadium. The Bears, under legendary coach George Halas, were gross favorites that day but were entangled in a dogfight by the Lions, who had recently relocated from Ohio, where they were known as the Spartans. It was that game effort that endeared the Lions to their new neighbors. NFL football on Turkey Day was then just a dream that became reality in Detroit.

Thanksgiving Day in Detroit and the traditions that surround this one game go back further than any of us have been alive, and that should be taken in account by the many journalists, executives, and decision-makers that offer, make or enforce opinion as it relates to the Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit.