Another University of Maine football season is upon us beginning with Saturday night’s opener at the University of Buffalo.

Another new head coach is preparing for his debut.

Ahhh, the sweet mixture of anticipation and expectation that surrounds an 0-0 football team on the eve of the first game. The questions about to be answered…

How well has first-year head coach Jack Cosgrove and his staff done preparing this team?

Will a young offensive line be able to protect junior quarterback Emilio Colon?

Is Colon’s arm strong enough to throw down field more this year?

What about the tailback situation? Will one of the freshmen emerge as a sensation in the way only college tailbacks can become overnight sensations?

Then there’s the secondary… The kicking game… The pass rush…

And underneath all of these specific questions are the philosophical biggies…

What are appropriate expectations for this program, which exists as a lonely northeastern outpost in Division I-AA and has been chipped away at by institutional budget cuts? How many wins are enough? How many losses are too many? Do people care? Should people care?

After eight seasons watching Black Bear football teams, I have come to some conclusions about the Big Questions.

No, I don’t believe most Maine sports fans really care whether the UM football team wins or loses on fall Saturdays. Certainly, fans don’t live and die with UM football the way they do with UM hockey.

Nor, frankly, should this type of fever ever be expected.

Mainers have gone ga ga for hockey, as snow-belt states bordering Canada inevitably do. Mainers know and have always appreciated both baseball and basketball, sports most of us have at least attempted to play. We are comfortable demanding success from these UM teams.

Football? It is outside the realm of too many Mainers’ experience. It is a curiosity, capable of arousing interest but little passion.

Why is this so? Maybe because football seems to be a piece of the rest of America that somehow arrived scattered on the wind a century ago to settle here and there in Maine. It has flourished in some spots. It has died in more. Less than half of Maine high schools play it. Entire Maine counties are totally devoid of it, except as it arrives on TV.

This does not make UM football irrelevant to all those who might not have played it or grown up with it in their schools. It just means a different standard of allegiance applies.

Mainers who did grow up with football understand the major limitations placed on the UM program in this environment. Not enough people to produce great teams. Not enough money to fund a great program. Therefore, the best out-of-state players will not come here to play.

And yet, we have seen in recent years an exceptional period in the 102-year history of UM football. The 1987 and ’89 teams won a share of the Yankee Conference championship and were nationally ranked. The ’89 team that went 9-3 won more games than any previous UM squad. Two players from that team are now playing in the NFL.

While these successes might have raised expectations for winning more championships, they did so primarily among coaches and UM administrators. Maine sports fans understood them for what they were. Curiosities, no more apt to be repeated than a couple of June snowstorms.

Football fever?

Even in the championship years, one of the first things to strike an observer at a UM home football game was the lack of crowd noise generated by 8,000 or 9,000 people. One UM head coach who happened to be from football-crazy Ohio, Tom Lichtenberg, couldn’t get over the fact Mainers come to football games to watch the way golf galleries watch that sport. Not as participants in the activity, but purely as spectators.

There is nothing wrong with this. It is enough that people come.

College football demands much of a Maine sports fan. It requires giving up the biggest part of a fall day. And not just any day, a weekend day.

The ultimate goal of any UM football team, then, must be to entertain these fans first, and win second. The ultimate sin for any UM football team is not to lose, but to be dull.

If Cosgrove & Company remember this, it won’t matter how many games they win or lose. At least, not to the fans.