Maybe because Dino Campopiano never made it to a Super Bowl during his high school football days at Johnston High that he truly appreciates how much playing in a state title game means to a Rhode Island high school football player.

"We almost made it my junior year, but we just missed. I never had a chance to play in a Super Bowl," said Campopiano, an All-State running back and defensive end in the late 1980s, who is now the Shea High football coach.

It was Wednesday night and Campopiano was at the Providence Gridiron Club's annual Super Bowl dinner with the captains and senior players from the eight teams that will play in state title games this weekend at Cranston Stadium.

All the players started the quest to be at the stadium this weekend back in early August, before student/athletes from any other Interscholastic League fall sports teams started official preseason practice.

All of the other fall sports teams finished their seasons at least three weeks ago. Their uniforms have been collected and packed away until next fall. Even the other 34 Interscholastic League football teams played their last game on Thanksgiving.

But about 300 of the almost 3,000 students who played high school football in Rhode Island are still playing. They have earned the right to play one more game with a state championship on the line.

It's the longest journey in Rhode Island high school sports. Football players start practice when their friends are at the beach and they're still playing when people are Christmas shopping. They played on warm, autumn Friday nights in September and rainy Friday nights in October. Now the calendar has turned to December and temperatures are dropping, but they're still playing.

Which may explain why playing in a Super Bowl has meant so much to what is now two generations of Rhode Island high school football players since the Interscholastic League playoff system began in 1972.

It's probably why Campopiano, when talking to the audience Thursday, certainly mentioned the 9-0 record in Division II competition this season that earned Shea a berth in the DII Super Bowl against Moses Brown. But the veteran Shea mentor spent more time talking about how his team is a family of young men who love the game of football. He talked about how they work together on the field and spend time together when they are off the field and out of school. He talked about how that sense of family is so important to young men growing up in an urban environment like Pawtucket.

There will be four championship games this weekend, two on Saturday and two on Sunday and each game has a host of subplots and special stories that go well beyond the scoreboard.

The feature attraction will be Saturday's state championship game between Hendricken and La Salle.

Hendricken has won six consecutive Super Bowls at the top level. Saturday's game will mark the fifth time in the last six years that La Salle has played Hendricken for the state title.

They are the two largest parochial schools in the state so they are natural rivals. But it has been decades since there has been a two-school rivalry in one sport that has attracted the attention Hendricken-La Salle football does these days.

Hendricken and La Salle have been playing on a different level than the rest of the teams for several years now. Over the last three seasons, including this year, Hendricken has a Division I record of 24-1 and La Salle is 23-2. The only league losses suffered by the Hawks and Rams have been to each other.

When the Hawks and Rams played their regular-season game on Nov. 4, they didn't even sell tickets at the gate because the pregame sale had already reached the capacity of La Salle's Cimini Stadium. A sold-out high school football game ahead of the opening kickoff is something you don't see every week in Rhode Island, or even every half-century for that matter.

When Central volunteered to move up to Division I this season from Division II to help the Interscholastic League form a new 14-team circuit, people questioned whether coach Peter Rios was making the right move for the Knights. After all, a Providence public school had not played in Division I for better than a decade.

"We lost our first three games," said Rios Wednesday night. "Our kids could have packed it in right there, but they didn't."

Instead the Knights came back and earned a playoff berth with four league wins, then upset South Kingstown in the quarterfinal round of the playoffs. So Sunday, Central will meet Portsmouth in the Division I title game, under the unique playoff format that has the two semifinal winners, Hendricken and La Salle, meeting in the state championship game and the two teams that lost in the semifinals playing for the Division I title.

Moses Brown has won the last two Division II state titles, but after a 46-16 regular-season loss to Shea the two-time defending state champion Quakers will be the underdog when they meet the Raiders at 4 p.m. Saturday.

For the first seven years of its existence the Juanita Sanchez/PCD/Wheeler co-op team was enjoying more success as a social experience, joining kids from an inner-city public school with kids from two small private schools, than it was as a football experience.

But last year the Cavaliers earned their first playoff berth and this year they are in the Division III Super Bowl where they will meet Burrillville, a team making its third straight appearance.

It's the end of the longest journey in Rhode Island high school sports and a memory that won't be forgotten.

(c)2016 The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.)

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(c) The Providence Journal, R.I.