Another time-honored tradition is interrupted by COVID.

Mansfield (green) and Foxboro (white) battle almost three decades ago at Memorial Park.

Over the course of the last 81 years, there has been one constant in the communities of Mansfield and Foxboro. Fads and fashions may have come and gone, and the makeup and character of the towns have changed radically over the course of time, but at least the residents could count upon the high schools' football teams meeting at least once each year.

That wasn't the case in 2020, a woe-begotten year in which a diabolical virus disrupted the very fabric of community life from the middle of March through the last day of December. Thanksgiving came and went without the athletes from Mansfield or Foxboro suiting up for the 74th annual holiday meeting of the teams, and the 90th meeting overall since 1925.

But the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association gave the state's high school athletes a reprieve of sorts when it created the "Fall II" season as a wedge between the traditional winter and spring seasons, with the intention of allowing a couple of the traditional higher-contact fall sports to compete once it was deemed that the grip COVID-19 had upon the world was in its waning stages.

That's what we all thought would happen, that is.

As those two towns were painfully reminded in the last couple of days, the coronavirus has not stepped out of the way quite yet. Despite safety precautions, including the use of masks and oceans of hand sanitizer, and the rising numbers of vaccinations in the commonwealth -- many of them dispensed at Foxboro's own Gillette Stadium -- COVID is as persistent as ever. 

And it has risen its ugly head to interrupt a tradition that has extended unbroken since the fall of 1938 -- the last time before this cycle of football that the Mansfield and Foxboro football teams have not met on the gridiron.

A breakout of COVID in Foxboro has forced cancellation of the 2020 season's game, which was scheduled for 10 a.m. this coming Saturday at Mansfield's Alumni Field. It's the second straight cancellation for the Warriors, who were supposed to have played Franklin in a Hockomock League crossover game last Friday.

Mansfield and Marshfield are familiar playoff foes.

Instead, Mansfield coach and athletic director Mike Redding has come up with an intriguing alternative -- one that I am dubbing "the Typographical Error Bowl," for reasons that will become obvious momentarily. The Hornets, one of the best teams in the state at 5-0, will play host to Marshfield High School's 4-0 Rams on Friday night, a 7 p.m. start at Alumni Field.

Yup, Mansfield and Marshfield -- probably the most popular example of spelling confusion within the newsrooms of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald for the better part of the last 50 years, or at least until both newspapers started paying better attention to the Hockomock League around the 1990s or so. 

That mistake isn't made as frequently now as it was when I was in high school back in the '70s, when the Hockomock was perceived as too low-rent to garner much notice from the metro papers. But once Marshfield started running into teams such as Mansfield and North Attleboro in playoff circumstances, the Globe's and Herald's copy editors finally figured out that Marshfield could not face two different teams on the same night on a regular basis.

As Redding said in a tweet announcing the schedule change, Mansfield and Marshfield have become familiar postseason foes in the era of the MIAA's extended football playoffs.

"These teams are long-time Division 2 playoff rivals with games in 2014 (Marshfield State Champs), 2015, 2016 and 2019 (Mansfield State Champs)," wrote Redding, who's in his 33rd year at the Hornet helm.

The Hornets are actually 2-3 against the Rams in the current format of the football playoffs. Mansfield (seeded No. 2) prevailed in the first round of the 2019 bracket, ousting No. 7 Marshfield 24-6. They also met in the quarterfinals in 2017 with No. 4 Mansfield ousting No. 5 Marshfield 34-14. Prior to that, the Hornets had suffered three straight defeats to the Rams, losing 41-35 in the 2016 quarterfinals, 22-0 in the 2015 semifinals and 42-14 in the 2014 quarterfinals.

One way or another, there should be no excuse for any spelling errors this coming Friday night.

Still, there will be a sense of emptiness felt within those that are heavily invested in the Mansfield-Foxboro rivalry.

Unlike the Attleboro-North Attleboro rivalry, which started on Thanksgiving a century ago and has stayed there, Mansfield and Foxboro first needed to reach a competitive balance before they opted to make it a holiday get-together.

The schools list 1925 as the "official" start of the rivalry, at least as high school football is defined today. Earlier than that, high school kids played on what were called "town teams," which also had alumni on their rosters and even a few football-hungry ringers of indeterminate age. But even after the high schools took a controlling interest where athletics were concerned, the gritty Italian immigrants from Mansfield were just too rough and rugged for the cultured lads on the other side of Robinson Hill.

Mansfield's 1935 team played Taunton on the holiday.

Mansfield won the first eight games by a combined score of 186-0. By 1933, no one in Foxboro thought it was worth the risk to play Mansfield any more, so the neighboring towns put the rivalry entirely on hold for a six-year period.

The Green and White also ditched North Easton's Oliver Ames High School as their Turkey Day foe and took on Taunton, a much larger school, from 1933 through 1946. It was a bit of a comeuppance for Mansfield, which won only four of the 13 games played on the holiday (most of those played at Hopewell Park in Taunton because the city kids thumbed their noses at Mansfield's cow-pasture field).

Foxboro started playing Mansfield again in 1939 and hoped for better long-term results after a scoreless tie in the first game of the resumed rivalry. Mansfield would dash those hopes by winning the next five games by a combined score of 141-8.

So, Foxboro's powers-that-be knew something had to be done. In grand American tradition, they went and stole Mansfield's coach out from under them. John Certuse, a native Mansfieldian in the early days of a Hall of Fame coaching career, was signed to a more lucrative contract to coach the Blue and Gold, and that paid an immediate dividend in a 14-0 Foxboro victory -- their first in the entire series -- in the 1945 game. 

Two years later, with Mansfield refusing to schedule Taunton (a ban that extended to 2012) because of the disparate sizes of the schools, the hands of friendly rivalry were extended across the border on Route 140 to create a Thanksgiving rivalry that would endure for the ages.

Mansfield coach Mike Redding, left, chats with 
Foxboro coach Jack Martinelli before a holiday game.

Over the course of 89 meetings, Mansfield enjoys a 51-35-3 edge over Foxboro. But since the series moved to the holiday, it's been much closer -- 37-34-2 in Mansfield's favor, and that's been a recent development with Mansfield winning 14 games of 19 played in the 21st century.

The game has been played at several different venues -- the old Fuller Field in Mansfield, replaced by Memorial Park after the Great Depression and then shifted to the artificial-surfaced Alumni Field behind the current high school. In Foxboro, games were played at what is now the Booth Playground near the center of town and then at the Ahern School Field (now Jack Martinelli Field) since the 1960s. I imagine the time will come when Sam Berns Community Field will serve as the game's newest home. And lest I forget, the teams played four times at Schaefer Stadium in the 1970s and just two years ago at Fenway Park in Boston.

But this year? It goes down in the records as "2020 -- Did not play (pandemic)."

I don't mind telling you that I certainly hope the masks, the hand sanitizer and the efforts of the researchers at Phizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson will let us dispense with all of this foolishness by the time November rolls around. If not, I fear that two groups of determined lads will find a secretive clearing somewhere in the Great Woods and have at it, football-wise, because two years will be far too long to have gone without an official battle for bragging rights.