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  • Edison coach Dave White congratulates quarterback Griffin O'Connor after a...

    Edison coach Dave White congratulates quarterback Griffin O'Connor after a scoring drive against La Mirada in La Mirada on Friday night.

  • Edison coach Dave White shares the championship trophy with his...

    Edison coach Dave White shares the championship trophy with his team after it beat La Mirada in the CIF-SS Division 3 title game on Friday.

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LA MIRADA – The season that Dave White hoped would never end is not ending yet.

He has one more week of practice, and at least one more game, as Edison’s football coach.

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Before this season began White announced that this is his final season coaching Edison football. He needs to step away to create the time required to travel to the East Coast next fall to watch his youngest son, Garrett, play football at Yale.

This final season, though, has yet to reach its finale.

With Edison’s 44-24 win over La Mirada on Friday in the CIF-Southern Section Division 3 championship game, it will play in the CIF State Regionals next week. Edison’s opponent will be announced Sunday.

The likely opponent is San Clemente, which beat Murrieta Valley in the CIF-SS Division 2 final Friday. Since La Mirada beat San Clemente, 43-14, in September, and Edison beat La Mirada by 20, Edison should be the home team for that game.

Regionals games will be played in Southern and Northern California next week. Regionals winners advance to the CIF State Championship Bowl Games in Sacramento, Dec. 16 and 17.

This is the first season of a new CIF-SS playoff system in football and most team sports. Instead of all of a league’s playoff representatives competing in the same playoff division, teams are placed into divisions according to their recent performance in the regular season and playoffs.

Mission Viejo and San Clemente are in the South Coast League. But they are not in the same division.

Mission Viejo was in Division 1 this season, and San Clemente is a Division 2 team. More on that later.

It’s not a perfect system. It will require tweaking and adjustment. But you can’t tweak and adjust a system that does not exist.

The new system worked out for Orange County football. In past seasons, there were the Southwest and Southern Divisions that almost always were made up of Orange County leagues and teams. Now, those teams are spread across several divisions.

The result was that Orange County had teams in seven different CIF-SS finals. That’s a record.

For many years, the Sunset League was a league in Division 1, or the Pac-5 Division as Division 1 was called for a few years. The league did OK – Los Alamitos won the Division 1 championship in 2002, for example, beating Mater Dei in the championship game.

Edison got to CIF-SS Pac-5 finals in 2006 and ’09. The Chargers lost to Orange Lutheran in the ’06 final and to Servite in the ’09 final.

Those results are evidence of what was happening – the larger private schools were starting to pull away from the public-school sector in SoCal high school football.

Southern California high school football has always been a changeling. Schools that won CIF championships in the ’60s and ’70s struggle to win league games these days. And a growing number of small private schools that could barely field teams 10 years ago are as good as mid-level public school programs are today.

Edison, and the rest of the Sunset League, was removed from the top division. They got some relief, so to speak. Edison in 2012 won the championship of the CIF-Southern Section’s Southwest Division, which was the equivalent of what is now Division 6.

Division 3 before the season began seemed like the proper division for Edison. Division 2 turned out to be good for San Clemente and Division 8 is the right fit for Yorba Linda.

And, yes, Division 1 is the correct division for Mater Dei and St. John Bosco, which play for the Division title at Angel Stadium.

Mission Viejo was in Division 1 this year. The Diablos lost to Rancho Cucamonga in Division 1’s second round. San Clemente lost to Mission Viejo by 38 points four weeks ago, but San Clemente is the team that won a CIF-SS championship, the Division 2 championship, and will play next week.

It was a chilly night at La Mirada, as it was at all of the other CIF-SS championship games Friday. White got the usual victory dousing from the Gatorade dispenser when the final seconds expired.

A soaked White made a joke about “this is how George Allen died,” remembering the long-debunked speculation that an ice-water bath after a win over UNLV caused the Long Beach State coach to die of ventricular fibrillation month later.

White is going to be around for a while. He still has another game to coach. Maybe two more.

“I’m just trying to enjoy every second of this,” he said, “just like I’ve been enjoying it all season.”

Contact the writer: sfryer@scng.com