La Salle running back Damon DiVozzi should be a key to his team’s success against North Kingstown tonight.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

They started practicing back in August, three days before their classmates who played other fall sports began working out.

The other fall sport athletes finished their seasons a month or so ago and by yesterday all of the winter sports teams had began their preseason practices.

But for approximately 750 Rhode Island high school football players the season goes on — and none of them is complaining.

That’s because when it all started back in August the goal of the 3,000 teenagers who played high school football in Rhode Island was to be playing under Tuesday Night Lights like those 750 will be doing tonight.

It’s a uniquely southern New England experience. Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts are the only places around the country where they play high school football playoff games on the Tuesday night after Thanksgiving. So tonight there will be 16 teams — four teams in each of the R.I. Interscholastic League’s four divisions — playing semifinal-round games in their respective divisional state tournaments. Tonight’s winners earn berths in their respective Super Bowls, which will be played Sunday and Monday night at Cranston Stadium.

It’s all part of the Interscholastic League’s fast-track playoff system. If you make it to the Super Bowl, it’s two playoff games within five or six days. Add in the fact that all but one of the 16 teams playing tonight also played a game on Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve and it’s three games in 11 or 12 days.

It has been that way for 10 years now, ever since the Interscholastic League added the Tuesday Night Lights semifinal-round games to its football playoff format. Before that only two teams qualified for postseason play in each division and those Super Bowls were played 10 days after Thanksgiving.

Some people say three games in 12 days is too much, but ask any of the 750 players who will be playing tonight and it’s a safe bet they will tell you they love the challenge of Tuesday Night Lights.

Of course, the players aren’t the only ones facing a challenge.

It’s one thing to watch your classmates or the high school kid down the street play a football game on a balmy Friday night in September or even a crisp October evening, but this is December. Watching high school sports on a December evening normally is an indoor exercise so the fans can be challenged by Tuesday Night Lights almost as much as the players.

Tonight’s forecast calls for temperatures in the mid-30s, which is warm compared to some Tuesday nights in previous years. But it still could be a challenge for some fans to leave a warm house to go to a football game in the middle of the week.

The rewards, however, could be substantial for anyone who enjoys watching head-to-head competition between talented high-school athletes.

Several of the state’s marquee runners will be matched up against each other tonight, like in Providence where La Salle, the undefeated Division I regular-season champion, will host North Kingstown.

North Kingstown is led by Dave D’Errico, the senior quarterback/running back, who is the state’s scoring leader with 168 points and only needs 42 yards to become one of the few players in Interscholastic League history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season. La Salle, meanwhile, has two of the top running backs in the state with Gus DelFarno and Kendall Perry. The two senior standouts have each scored 13 touchdowns and have combined for 1,600 yards rushing.

Down in South Kingstown tonight it will be a rematch of last year’s Division II Super Bowl and a head-to-head showdown between two All-State running backs when South Kingstown meets Toll Gate. Toll Gate’s Doug Johnson and South Kingstown’s Tim Hazard, a pair of senior running backs who were both first-team All-Staters in 2007, are the top two scorers, respectively, in Division II this season. Johnson has tallied 126 points on 21 touchdowns and rushed for 1,683 yards while Hazard has scored 84 points and rushed for 1,200 yards.

The wind always seems to be blowing across Portsmouth High’s Kennedy Field, so on a December evening it could be a little chilly when the Patriots host to Barrington in a Division I contest tonight. But veteran Portsmouth athletic director Mike Lunney thinks it will take a lot more than temperatures in the mid-30s to keep Portsmouth fans away from tonight’s game.

“This is our first home playoff game since 1998. The people here are excited,” said Lunney.

That same sense of excitement probably will be in the air a few miles away where Tiverton will be playing its first “real” home playoff game.

The Tigers have played in a host of playoff games over the last decade and a few times they officially were listed as the home team because of they were the higher-seeded team. But because the Tiverton home field didn’t have lights until this season the Tigers always had to take their “home” semifinal-round games on the road to another school’s fields that had lights.

But now the Tigers have lights and an undefeated Division III record, which they will put on the line when they host Moses Brown tonight.

It’s all part of Tuesday Night Lights — a Rhode Island experience that has people cheering.

jgillool@projo.com