The notes begin to fly five minutes before the final Friday bell:

“Give me Marvin Harrison,” reads one. “That way I’ll have the ‘Manning-Harrison hookup’ and I’ll give you whoever you want. My running backs crush yours. You can pick any one of them.”

“You’re a fool,” a student says to his neighbor after reading it.

“I can’t wait to show you both up this weekend,” says a third.

The color commentary has begun, and the conversation spills into the hallway as the bell rings. Other students chime into a chorus of player names, yards gained and lost.

Injury lists. Trade offers. Forceful and disparaging chatter among best friends.

It must be fantasy football season.

What, you may ask, does this term that is plastered on Internet sites, magazines, advertisements and television shows mean? A decade ago, only a handful of sports enthusiasts could explain the game of fantasy football. Today, some 15 million adults and many additional children reportedly play fantasy football nationwide and in cyberspace.

In fantasy football, fantasy teams are selected and managed by fantasy “owners.” When a fantasy league is created, owners (10, in most leagues) come together to draft their teams from a player pool comprising National Football League (NFL) athletes. As those real-life players succeed and score points in the NFL, fantasy owners who have those athletes on their fantasy teams score points as well: fantasy points.

The object of the game is to outscore the other fantasy teams on a weekly basis. At the end of the fantasy season—which coincides with the end of the NFL regular season—the fantasy team with the most wins against its fantasy opponents wins its league.

To those who are active in fantasy football, the ins and outs of competition are not nearly as complicated as they may seem to others. For active fantasy owners, the game is simple—it’s about winning. More specifically, it is about beating one’s friends, as fantasy football is as much about hubris as it is about football.

“I’m all about winning. You always want to show up your friends. Maybe you don’t have the best team, but when you do win you want to show everyone and laugh in their faces,” said senior and fantasy owner Alex Tuvin.

Junior David Hecht’s fantasy league, he says, “is very intense and people get into it with each other, but it’s all fun.”

Intensely competitive and fun, in this case, are not contradictory terms. Those who play fantasy football find the competition to be a welcome and bond-building diversion from their usual schedules.

“It’s a great activity because every day after school when you take a break from homework and you need something to do, it’s really exciting and it’s really social. It gets you involved with your friends,” Hecht said.

“Fantasy is great. It brings groups together, brings unity and communication to the group. I definitely think it’s something that builds good friendship sand it’s all fun recreation,” said Physical Education Chair Jeffrey Rose, who has participated in fantasy football for ten years and this year reunited with a college friend in joining a league.

Aggressive arguing—‘trash talk,’ as fantasy owners say—is an essential part of the game.

“That’s what makes fantasy football—getting into arguments on draft night. Later, when you’re right, it’s like you’re a genius,” boasts Tuvin.

Interactive websites, which often include open message boards for discussing football—or, as the case may be, rivalries, inside-jokes and insults—help feed the trash talk.

“Every week people post messages whether it’s talking trash or proposing trades,” Hecht said. “And every day you go online and check in.”

Of course, going online to check in was impossible just a few years ago. Before the Internet, fantasy football was essentially a dead game, and those who played did so with difficulty.

“Ten years ago you had to keep records yourself. It was just time consuming. The commissioner ended up having to spend a few hours each Monday and Tuesday calculating everybody’s’ results from a USA Today. The Internet’s made a fantastic difference. You can basically work up to the last minute [before NFL game time], and the Internet calculates all your points,” Rose said.

The Internet—through companies such as Yahoo!, CBSSportsline, ESPN, Fanball and the NFL itself—now facilitates all functions of fantasy leagues, from message boards and score calculations to league standings, match-ups, tournaments and eventual champions.

For owners, there is now very little work involved—all that is needed is a computer. “Now, the Internet automatically updates points for all the games going on so you can watch your players almost in real time,” said sophomore Elliot Blask, who has participated in fantasy football with JDS classmates since seventh grade.

Since the Internet returned fantasy football to prominence, the game’s popularity has spread to other media, including magazines, newspaper sections, 24-hour television and radio.

“You can get so much news from so many different outlets—from ESPN or Fox or Yahoo!, almost every website has a sports section with fantasy statistics and helpful things. And on TV, they used to not have fantasy football shows but it’s become part of athletic life and now fantasy football is everywhere,” Tuvin said.

Because of the excess of available resources, there is now a large fantasy football preparation process each year and each week.

“Every year before the draft, I buy a fantasy football magazine, read that, go online and do research on players,” Hecht said, not mentioning the weekly preparation which goes into fielding a team for 17 weeks.

Tuvin focuses his attention on that weekly work.

“On a week-to-week basis you have to look at the NFL match-ups. Most of the time, I look at the player news and see how the past match-ups have gone. You have to make little preparations so you don’t make an idiot out of yourself with horrible picks,” he said.

When game day rolls around each Sunday, fantasy owners rest from their week of preparation by further inundating themselves with football.

While Tuvin watches hours of games on Comcast Cable’s new NFL Network, Rose makes sure to watch as much football as technologically and financially feasible.

“I have DirecTV and NFL Sunday Ticket,” Rose said, referring to satellite television packages built around NFL programming. “I have two televisions in one room of my house and I can see through from there to a big screen television—I watch three televisions at once every Sunday.”

For some, fantasy football is a hobby. For others, the game borders on obsession. Whether for recreation, cash or other prizes, fantasy football owners love the game and are increasingly loyal to their imagined, cyberspace-based teams.

As Rose sums up the fantasy football boom, “you do it because you enjoy it and because it’s the NFL. It’s here to stay.”