Endless love

BY GINA DAUGHERTY | CIN

Playoff matchups:
• Elder-Clayton Northmont
• Colerain-Moeller
• Edgewood-Dayton Carroll
• Kings-Jackson
• Wyoming-Germantown Valley View
• Mariemont-Clinton-Massie
• Reading-Versailles

For postseason coverage, go to www.cincinnati.com/
preps/.

Going native
1. Eat like a native
2. Drink like a native
3. Endless love
4. Bad name, great game
5. Say what?

High School Football:

If you want to understand Cincinnati, then you have to understand the makeup of the people here, says Don Heinrich Tolzmann, director of German American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

We are a city of festivals -- a city that likes to celebrate.

"We have strong neighborhoods, and high-school sports plays into that," Tolzmann says. "The Catholic church is strong with parishes and schools and with football. It's a hilly city, and people gather around the hills."

And they particularly like to gather at high-school football games. It's harder to get tickets to some of the city's high-school rivalry games than it is to get Bengals tickets.

But if you want to see good football, for just a little cash and without all the ego of professional sports, Cincinnati high school football is your ticket.

The playoffs are here, and while we can't predict the outcome of the games, we can predict that fans will be crazy with excitement.