I'm officially on a mission to kill a word, a word that isn't really a word but one that, nonetheless, manages to be misused, overused and has become an icon of the cheesy television announcer guy.

Trickeration. It's not even a damn word!

Don't believe me? Check it out yourself at Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trickeration

Nobody's a worse offender than ESPN's Reese Davis, with the constant 'trickeration' references that dot the blizzard of college football highlights on any given Saturday. How has this non-word become a word so synonymous with any number of football gadget plays is beyond me.

What really gnaws at me isn't that the word is used so much as much as who transformed the pseudo-word into an accepted part of college football vernacular. Real journalists from real journalism schools! No, not the meatheads and ex-jocks that have managed to infiltrate the press box, but rather the writers, reporters and media professionals made this non-entry in any working dictionary into a word that's not yet a real word.

Clearly, the writer in me is getting the best of me, whatever that 'best' is...

No 'Trickeration' Needed For Lake Orion: I was as shocked as anyone at the ease and precision the Lake Orion Dragons executed with in dismantling undefeated Dearborn Fordson. The Tractors had run on everyone and anyone -- at will -- until the semifinal matchup at Troy Athens.

The Dragons looked they were breathing fire -- not cold air -- in the ferocity with which they attacked Fordson, who looked frustrated and thoroughly confused from the jump in Orion's 38-0 runaway win. Even the first play, a Fordson pass, was a runaway train going the other way in the form of an intercepted pass returned for a score, not that I saw it. I was walking up to the stadium, filled with about 7,500 fans -- a beautiful sight -- and it was already 7-0 before 30 seconds elapsed from the game clock.

By the way, let me echo Tom Markowski, who joined myself and Oakland Press guru Keith Dunlap in the cozy confines of the press box at Athens, in saying athletic director Bob Dowd and Athens did a fabulous job hosting their third-straight semifinals. Parking is plentiful, ingress and egress to and from the school campus is accomodating and the facility is first-rate. I think Athens should be an easy choice to join Ferndale's Division I (formerly Class A) boys' quarterfinal in Oakland County as an annual site for an annual playoff game.

As for the upcoming championships, Lake Orion and Warren De LaSalle have a chance to deliver the two marquee championships to the metropolitan area, the east side of the state, in a year when it looked like the west side of the state would run away any and all hardware available to the statewide contingency of schools offering football. That and it'll be interesting to see if Detroit Country Day has learned anything from their runners-up defeat last year towards winning a championship.

Book's For Sale At Ford Field: Copies of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries will be available at the Michigan High School Athletic Association's football finals at Ford Field on Friday and Saturday.

A portion of the proceeds will benefit Officials For Kids, the charitable arm of the MHSAA's corp of registered officials.

Come watch some great football -- $10 gets you four games and two locals schools each day -- and buy the book as a gift for you or someone else and most importantly, help some kids who deserve it more than anything else!

The book will be parked by the Lighthouse Sportswear station in the main atrium and will be advertised on the LED scoreboards during the games!

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, a follow-up of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and blogs for The Oakland Press at www.MIPrepZone.com

If you had asked most prep football fans after Week Three of the 2008 MHSAA football season where the strength of the state lied in terms of regional supremacy, more would have voted for the lower west side of the state than voted for Barack Obama two weeks ago.

Thanks to Oakland County's strong showing and a handful of schools in and around metro Detroit, any mandate from the voters 10 weeks ago carries about as much clout as a restaurant bill signed on behalf of the City of Detroit by county inmate Kwame Kilpatrick.

Three of the four schools from the Division I semifinals were metro Detroit schools, including Lake Orion, who was breathing fire instead of cold breath in a start-to-finish domination of the Dearborn Fordson Tractors at Troy Athens tonight. Livonia Stevenson has made back-to-back trips to the semifinals, a strong testament to the quality of play in the Kensington Lakes league.

Detroit Country Day, Bloomfield Hills Lahser, Southfield High, Warren DeLaSalle and Inkster's Vikings all made it to the semifinal showdowns today, with DCD, Inkster and DeLaSalle advancing to next week's chapionships at Ford Field. The possibility of having four Oakland County schools playing for championships didn't come to fruition but it's still an impressive feat that the possibility even existed. The Yellowjackets are returning for a back-to-back finals appearance and there's a chance that two Oakland County teams and four metropolitan schools could earn titles next weekend.

Obviously Lake Orion's rematch with Rockford will be the most highly-discussed game in some time because a start and finish bookend games between two East-West superpowers is also about as likely as the Lions beating Tennessee on Turkey Day. The two schools opened the season at Eastern Michigan University's Rynearson Stadium and the Rams emerged as 17-7 victors.

Now we as a community and region must support our own cause. Two mega days of prep football at Ford Field. It's time to bolster our own economy and and show the flag of the east side of the state. Our youth from four local schools located in three different counties will be ready, willing and able on the field -- will we return the favor in the stands?