Let Me Just Ask You One Question: Can You Play Like Champions

Just when I thought I couldn’t be happier after hearing that Friday Night Lights garnered a two season pick up, along comes the season finale. A nice tranquil beginning to the docile sounds of Jakob Dylan with a rundown of all the coupling and the funny juxtaposition of a near empty baseball stadium considering during the football season the whole town shuts down and shows up. Of course this turned out to be a little foreshadowing.

When you thought the Riggins/Collette marriage couldn’t get any funnier than Mindy’s Finding Nemo wedding vows, we get the whole white wedding complete with a mariachi band singing Peter Frampton. But my favorite part was the Taylors wonder why they got an invite because we all have gone to weddings were we didn’t really know the bride and groom but went because 1) you didn’t want to be rude, 2) open bar. With that said, how did Buddy Garrity get an invite?

The big new going into the fourth season was Joe McCoy’s power trip to oust Coach Taylor to institute his own patsy to guarantee playing time for his boy. As eloquent as his speech to the school board was, he really shouldn’t had said anything, just stepped to the mic and flashed his jewelry and say, “That’s all I have” and walked out. It should be interesting to see who follows Coach to East Dillon, Tami? Julie? Buddy? Lance? And even if the boosters redrew the district line, does Texas have open enrollment which may lead any Panthers to change his stripes to a Lion?

This season we saw emotional and heartfelt sendoffs of Small Williams and Jason Street, but the third season really belonged to one Tyra Collette. At the beginning of the series, she was basically the throwaway character bouncing from boy to boy without a discernable plotline to participate in for the first half of that season. The writers more than made up for that with Tyra’s determination to get into college this year. Sure there was a hiccup along the way named Cash, but the student body president got her biggest win with her getting admitted into UT thanks to an admissions essay that should hang on the wall of every teen girl’s wall to remind themselves of the potential they have.

Really, it would be silly to even debate any other show is the best one currently on television; Billy Riggins of all people gave a monologue when Tim pulled him aside after the reception was better than any other character on any other show. Seriously, Billy Riggins. But the third season puts Friday Night Lights in the discussion of the greatest of this decade if not all time. I can’t wait to root for the Lions, I may even get DirecTV just to be able to do that sooner than later.

Friday Night Lights 3.x gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.