Community pride and camaraderie represent what’s good about football.

Football-sown community fellowship and pride represent what’s good about the game.

“What it is, is football,” the late Andy Griffith reminded us in the classic comedy routine that launched his career more than six decades ago, shortly before he and deputy Barney Fife began keeping the peace in Mayberry. Much has changed about the game in the intervening years. As Houston proudly hosts Super Bowl LI, much has changed about the Lone Star State, although Texans’ love of football has not waned.

The game may not have been invented in Texas — that honor goes to New Jersey, in 1869 — but football, and football fanaticism, got here as quickly as they could. Colleges and town teams were playing football in Texas by the 1880s. In rip-roaring West Texas oil-boom towns during the early decades of the 20th century, competition among high school teams was so fierce that schools suited up players whose five-o’clock shadows were darkening by noon; local businesses recruited promising athletes by finding jobs for their dads. In the 1930s, wide-open aerial-circus football as practiced by TCU’s Slingin’ Sammy Baugh and other offense-minded teams captured the attention of football fans around the country, fans accustomed to three yards and a cloud of dust (or splat of mud). Legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice proclaimed Texas-style football the finest in the land. Three Southwest Conference teams — SMU, TCU and Texas A&M — won a national title in the ’30s.

In small Texas towns, even today, downtown businesses flip the “Closed” sign on Friday evenings, and fans, like heat-seeking moths, caravan toward the football-field lights in a rival town. As Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright observed some years back, Texas for years had — and arguably still has — the finest high school players in the country. Until the 1970s, most of them stayed to play in the late and still-lamented Southwest Conference.

Professional football didn’t establish a foothold in Texas until the 1960s, although the pros gradually began to overshadow their collegiate brethren. When the boys in blue and silver based in a city to the north of here began to thrive, they became not Dallas’ team or Texas’ team but America’s team. Houston’s “Luv Ya, Blue” Oilers were a bit scruffier than their North Texas counterparts, but Houston fans always maintained that team’s personality, as embodied by the late Bum Phillips, mirrored the city’s. (Today’s Texans are closer to the corporate style of the Cowboys.)

Football-engendered community pride and camaraderie — as evidenced here in the Bayou City for the past 10 days or so — represent what’s good about the game, whether it’s small-town kids, parents and a marching band on rickety bleachers beside a ragged field or fans by the thousands under a multimillion-dollar dome on a Sunday afternoon. We have to admit, though, that fanaticism and excess are all-too-frequent teammates in the Lone Star State. Witness the NCAA’s so-called death penalty wielded against Southern Methodist University and the sexual assault scandal now darkening Baylor University.

What it is, is football, we have to say with a shake of the head, even though it shouldn’t be.

Here in Houston, meanwhile, hosting the Super Bowl has been a net positive for the nation’s fourth-largest city, despite predictable debate about public expenditures and traffic and other impositions. We enjoy having people over, so to speak, enjoy illustrating yet again that this thriving, striving city not only is a superb place to live but also a superb place to visit. Our Atlanta and New England visitors will be going home — with plans to come again, we hope — while we get to enjoy a host of upgrades and amenities three and four years in the making. The magnificent new downtown development in and around the George R. Brown Convention Center and Discovery Green is a prime example. (We like the colored lights on the bridges over Southwest Freeway, too.)

Griffith’s persona in his comedy routine, a country deacon bewildered by his very first football game, has a question for the fellow in the seat beside him: “Friend, what is it that they’re ahollerin’ for?”

We’ll see who’ll be hollerin’ louder this evening inside the cavernous confines of the NRG. The cheers beyond the NRG are for Houston, from Houstonians, pleased and proud that their Bayou City got it right as host of Super Bowl LI.