There’s some more to the story of what Valdosta High School football accomplished in the 1960s.

Last week, I supplied a rundown of the prep gridiron programs in Georgia that had the longest runs of success at the highest levels. It included the story of how the 1969 season ended in a game between the Wildcats and Athens High in Valdosta. The final score of this state championship contest was tied up, and the two schools were declared co-champions.

Earlier this year I read the autobiography of one of Georgia’s most famous authors/columnists/sports journalists, the late Lewis Grizzard. He mentions his time in Athens both as a University of Georgia student and reporter for the upstart Athens Daily News publication. One of his assignments was a state championship football game between Athens High and mighty Valdosta.

But it’s not the same game as was described last week in these pages. Not the one by Moultrie’s own Murray Poole (my first real boss in the business, kind of a mentor if you will from Brunswick) in remembering the recently deceased ex-Bulldog quarterback Andy Johnson.

This game recalled in Grizzard’s book took place in 1965 on a frigid night with Athens High as the home team.

In the 1969 game, Athens needed to make a two-point conversion at the end to tie the final score. Four years earlier, according to Grizzard’s account, Athens was only a PAT kick away from achieving a tie against the Valdosta team. And the Athens kicker at the time, whom Grizzard said worked part-time at the Daily News and was a serious college prospect with a streak of about 50 made PATs in a row, missed. Valdosta perseveres for one of its six solo state titles.

The college kicking career never happened.

But how eerie is it to think what almost happened: Two teams split two state championships that far apart with the same school achieving the tying point at the last second.

Not every high school football team is fortunate enough to have a Ryan Fitzgerald type.

Looking back at all of these team records, it came to my attention that the 2017 season the junior Fitzgerald had for Colquitt County High was one of the single best seen by any kicker in the state ever. Never mind school records; he came close to setting some state marks.

And to think, after the American Heritage loss at home on ESPNU in 2016 some were lamenting that the Packers didn’t have a kicker.

What do we get one year later? Eighteen field goals. I keep having to go back to the official stat list and make sure I see that right. Fitzgerald made 18 field goals last season. Two guys share the state record for a season at 20, and one of those did it not too far away from here for Cairo High.

When you make four field goals in one game twice – that’s right, I said twice – that will drive your overall number up. It’s easy to remember that Fitzgerald made four in the quarterfinal playoff game at Archer because that was all the scoring the Packers did in that game to win 12-7.

It takes some looking back, and I just did that, to be reminded that Fitzgerald made four kicks in last year’s Valdosta game at home (final score 27-0).

Lots of kickers made four field goals in one game, but the record – shared by three – is five. It was done two times in 2010.

Back to the Archer game, Fitzgerald wowed us all putting through the 60-yard free kick field goal, something a lot of folks at that time didn’t know you could do in a football game. Be reminded again that he set the school record already in 2017 making one from 52 yards at Camden County.

Free kick or not, all field goals count the same, and in the record books Fitzgerald is the only one with a 60-yarder by his name. But there are a few names and distances ahead of him. The record is 67 yards, and unless that was free kick also that one would be snapped from the 50. That’s the spot where Fitzgerald set his tee for the kick at Archer.

Maybe half joking, half serious, I asked Fitzgerald earlier this year if he would try PAT kicks from 32 yards in order to prepare for an NFL career. Why not? It’s been said that baseball players who know they are going to be drafted high would use a wood bat in their last season of high school or college.

The NFL made to me a ridiculous move increasing the 1-point PAT length from 20 to 32 yards. It was considered too easy. How difficult is it supposed to be just to get one point? Now you can take a lot kicks that are shorter than a PAT and get three points.

Colleges and high schools have yet to follow suit. Maybe it should depend on the kicker, because Fitzgerald was 49-for-50 last season.

It also doesn’t seem fair that Fitzgerald can do kickoffs from his 40-yard-line. In 2017, he had 63 touchbacks out of 86 kickoffs, and the average distance was 57.5 yards (a touchback is an automatic 60 yards).

It’s like the time before Little League baseball changed the age limit rules. Before the change, a 13-year-old could play all the way to the World Series as long as he was 12 when the ‘All-Star’ season began. The distances from the mound to the plate (46 feet) and base-to-base (60) are much shorter than when you get to school ball (90 for the bases, 60.5 mound to home).

At the Southeast Regional tournament about six years ago, the team from North Carolina had a no-so-little pitcher warming up. I commented to somebody that he needed to go to second base and pitch. If you’ve heard the ‘aspirin tablets’ comparison, you know what I mean.

The NFL recently altered kickoff rules to make it a safer play. That nobody can argue with. When Mark Richt was coach of the Georgia Bulldogs, he often advocated eliminating the kickoff on safety grounds.

The talking heads on TV programs, after the NFL changes came out, went on about how it will eventually go away, one stating “Just put the ball on the 25-yard line.”

But if you take away the kickoff, it has to be gone altogether. Therefore, you would also lose the onside kick strategy. Not only could you no longer surprise people with it, as Lowndes did on Colquitt to start the second half of the 2016 game here, but you don’t have your lone way to get the football back if you are trailing late, score but still trail.

Maybe somebody with all the time in the world can calculate the onside kick success rate just in those situations.

But don’t suggest letting a trailing team have the ball back if it scores but remains behind in the fourth quarter. That’s basically punishing the other team for playing well enough to be in the lead.

There’s only one sure way to avoid being in this kind of mess: DON’T FALL BEHIND!