The other day I was saying . . . to someone else, I think, but maybe just to myself . . . how now that there's a little autumn tang in the air, I want to watch a football game . . . mud flying and limbs tangling and girls jumping up and down and shouting with their red, red scarves blowing against the frosty sky. I don't want to watch a professional football game; I want to watch a school game, full of friends and surreptitious beer and a healthy, innocent desire to crush the other team like bugs.

So tonight I come home and I'm tired and more than a little blue (it has been one of those days, you understand), and in between watching the playoffs I find myself watching Friday Night Lights, which is a new series about . . . a high school football team in Texas. Now, I went to a little school, with a little football team; we didn't even have cheerleaders. This is not exactly the kind of football I was thinking of. Apparently in Texas, high school football games involve coaches with headsets, and cheerleaders and marching bands, and they are televised. The captains marching forward across the field towards each other for the coin toss look like large and well padded alien invaders.

This is not the point. The point is that the show stars Kyle Chandler, who used to star in Homefront, a short-lived series about a fictional factory town in Ohio right after World War II. It was on when I was in college, and though we didn't actually get anything you would call "reception" in my dorm . . .

[yes, children, she whispered, in those days we didn't have cable]

. . . I huddled over my roommate's 13-inch television every Tuesday night, listening to the hissing soundtrack and trying to make out the moving figures, which are only dim white shades floating through a thick haze of static.

I loved that show. It was a technicolor fantasy world that wasn't quite true to its time, or any time. Its characters didn't belong anywhere except in the tidied up imaginations of screenwriters who could neither bear to let their creations wear the prejudices of their time, nor import a new and improved set of values from the future for them. No one was very bad, not even the snotty rich people who owned the factory. And the characters that were too good to be believed were at least dimwitted or homely.

And there was Kyle Chandler playing Jeff, the naive, handsome, and adorably clean-cut baseball player. Now he's playing a handsome, still somewhat adorable football coach. Clearly, he's found some sort of a niche.

But that's not the point either. Humor me. I'm blue.

The point is that Kyle Chandler isn't as cute as he used to be. The features that were clean-cut and boyish at 25 have coarsened at 40, and he has bags under his eyes.

But the really weird thing is that for a moment, as I was looking at him, and trying to pick out the boyish figure of yesteryear among the shifted planes of his face, it was like I could see the whole process of turning from a handsome young actor into Paul Newman . . . as if I could peek into the future at the eventual Kyle Chandler, his skin deformed and collapsed into a tragic caricature of the boy. And myself, she who used to be the beautiful Samantha Yeager, looking wistfully at photographs of a young actor and wishing that I was back in my dorm room, leaning against the cinderblock wall with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, peering through into the mist of a tiny screen.