I got so much guff from my football-loving colleagues in the newsroom a dozen years ago when I wrote in this space advocating for flag football to replace tackle football at all levels, from middle school through high school, college and the pros.

It was a time at which the first major concerns about concussions and other serious injuries were beginning to roil the sport — guys with serious damage beginning to come clean about the price they paid, guys dying young, wives going on crusades.

Twelve years ago this very week, I wrote: “There’s a solution for this whole football-concussion, football-dementia, football-suicide problem that’s plaguing the sport. It’s not football that’s the problem. Football is a great game. But from my point of view, the pickup touch football we played on Sunny Oaks Circle in Altadena every fall Saturday in the ’60s were exactly as great, or more so, as those played any given Sunday in the NFL. Did it matter that our linemen didn’t average 325 pounds? That we pumped no iron, much less steroids into our veins? That the only time anyone ever got hurt it was just a skinned knee from hitting the asphalt?”

For me, I wrote, what makes the game worth watching, and playing, is the long bomb and the end-around run 90 yards to score, not a bunch of beefed-up tackles knocking each other about on the line of scrimmage.

Then, two years ago, I came back with a specific call for the flag game, in which offensive players have their forward progress stopped when a defender pulls a piece of cloth from their waistband, not when they are knocked unconscious: “Flag football with the best athletes in the nation not only would be just as good as the game we know today — it would be a lot better. No cringing every time you see a brutal play.”

Our city editor, Bob Rector, former Glendale High School gridiron star, was having none of it. The game is not the game without beefy linemen and the “three yards and a cloud of dust” style of moving the pigskin slowly up the field used by former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes. The flag thing — it’s something else entirely. It’s playing tennis without a net.

No one paid any attention to me, until they did — or, rather, certainly nothing to do with my ravings in the local rag, but until the huge and very recent boom in San Gabriel Valley and Whittier-area high schools forming girls’ flag football teams.

As our longtime SGV prep sports editor Fred Robledo reported in August, girls’ flag “has grown to the point that for the first time in CIF-SS history it will have championship games at the end of the fall season.”

This, after the game got its start just last season, with big turnouts initially and even bigger ones now: 40 schools in our circulation area have flag football teams this year.

“We’re all learning game to game,” Glendora High coach Greg Bidolli told Fred. “I’ve coached many sports in the San Gabriel Valley, but nothing is like this one. It’s all kind of unknown. You don’t know what to expect from your team or your opponents yet.” It’s not like the Turkey Tussle in the Rose Bowl, played annually since 1947 between John Muir and PHS.

Northview High in Covina played its way into the CIF championship game in just its first season of flag football. Check out some of the great photo coverage at our website. The girls — properly safety conscious — wear mouthgards to protect their teeth with some startling designs on the exterior plastic. And they run and gun with the best of them. I thought that most of the interest in playing would come from former soccer players. But Fred says that more often than not they are former basketball players. Certainly a lot of talent out there — Northview’s freshman quarterback, Alexis Sierra, passed for 5,100 yards and 49 touchdowns in the regular season. They lost to Antelope Valley in the championship game. But, hey, there’s always next year. And many years after that.

Still time for the boys to make the switch.

Wednesday at random

I didn’t do all the research that I might have last week when commenting on the lawsuit filed by the Whittier Conservancy, the latest salvo in the decades-long fight over the towering ficus trees on Greenleaf in Whittier’s Uptown last week. That is, I didn’t take a stroll through the shopping and dining district. Very few if any sidewalks there are actually buckled. And I remain skeptical that three blocks worth of the magnificent shade-creating trees really need to be chopped in the name of efficiency. “Tree succession over time,” as the 2008 Uptown Specific Plan called for, is way more preferable.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.