Idle chatter while wondering how long the Patriots will have to hold the Mayo ?Once again, the Agganis Foundation will team up with The Item to present players of the week awards in high school football.The foundation, which has awarded $1,314,825 in scholarships to 813 student-athletes since its inception in 1955, went to bat for The Item when the sponsor of the original Gold Helmet Award bowed out due to financial considerations. Thankfully, the foundation – which honors Lynn’s greatest athlete ever – saw the need to acknowledge student-athletes for their accomplishments and for their overall contribution to the community.The Agganis Foundation will also – as in the past – honor the Offensive and Defensive Players of the Year at The Item’s annual football banquet in December.Aside from being officially recognized as Lynn’s greatest athlete ever in an end-of-the-century Item poll, Agganis was also the type of person a young kid could admire. Toward that end, the boys picked for the weekly and annual offensive and defensive awards must be in good standing with their schools – especially academically – and the community at large.We are certainly grateful to the foundation, its president (Ted Grant) and chairman (Attorney Thomas C. Demakis) for its continued support of our area’s student-athletes.Fred Cusick, who died Tuesday, was the epitome of a professional broadcaster in that he never made himself the show. Guys like Cusick, Curt Gowdy, Ned Martin, Gil Santos and Gino Cappelletti, and Sean McDonough ? they blended in with the game. And even Jerry Remy, who has his own schtick to be sure, respects the game too much to ever let it get out of hand.Fred Cusick was the voice of my adolescence, first on the radio, and then on television, as the Bruins rose up and took the town by storm. I still say that as popular as the Red Sox and Patriots are now, neither team has ever, nor will it ever, approach the regional hysteria and adulation the city and its suburbs heaped on the Bruins in the Bobby Orr/Phil Esposito era.Cusick could have been huge in this town ?a regular personality unto himself the way Johnny Most was. But he chose, instead, to simply announce the game and let Johnny Pierson (first) and Derek Sanderson (later) explain the action in more technical terms.He also had such an economy of language. Listening him describe a player who “wheels, shoots, SCORES” was almost poetic.I always think of him when I hear Jack Edwards – the master of needless hyperbole – on TV, because I always come away asking why Fred Cusick ever retired.With regards to the above observation about the Bruins, if there’s one thing the Big Bad Bruins taught me is that few teams sustain that type of immense popularity forever. The Patriots – and maybe even the Red Sox – will eventually lose some of that rabid support. Someday, both teams will backslide into something approaching mediocrity when management or coaching staffs finally change hands and new owners, whose primary objectives aren’t necessarily to win, take over ? just like when Storer Broadcasting sold the Bruins to the Jacobs Brothers, or when the Celtics foundered under the Alphonse/Gaston family.So, fans, don’t see Patriot excellence as a birthright. It’ll all end someday.The jury – at least for me – is out on the penalty assessed to Adalius Thomas after he sacked Buffalo’s Trent Edwards Monday. It didn’t look to me as if Thomas intentionally threw the quarterback down as much it looked as if Edwards just wouldn’t GO down.Bill Belichick found a way around outwardly criticizing the penalty when he reminded everyone of the 2008 Super Bowl and said that bad things happen when the opposing quarterback avoids the sack.But the roughing-the-passer call on Vince Wilfork was an absolute joke. And it cost the Patriots, perhaps, a two-point safety too. Wilfork grabbed Edwards by the waist as he was going backwards, and the two of them went down in a pile. He was nowhere near Edwards’ knees.So what, exac