Matt Ryan’s high school experience? Quaint.

Newtown Square, Pa. — Not everyone gets to experience Friday night lights.

Matt Ryan didn’t.

“Mine wasn’t quite that, but it was still a lot of fun,” Ryan, the Falcons quarterback, said this week as he prepared to travel to his hometown to play the Eagles.

Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Ryan went to Penn Charter, a private school founded by William Penn in 1689. Ryan played his games on Friday or Saturday afternoons.

Penn Charter played its first game this season at 4 p.m. and two others at 3:45 p.m. Its game Friday at Episcopal Academy was at 3:15 p.m.

“We keep an eye on daylight savings,” Penn Charter athletics director Edward Foley explained.

Ryan’s parents, Mike and Bernie, were at Episcopal to see Penn Charter lose 22-6. Their youngest son, John, was the starting quarterback for the Quakers before a broken collarbone ended his senior season. Oldest son Michael is an assistant coach.

Mike Ryan has been going to Penn Charter games since Matt Ryan was a freshman in the fall of 1999. So why the afternoon games?

“I have no idea,” he said with a laugh.

First of all, none of the schools in the Inter-Ac league — or the Inter Academic League — have lights. And it’s not that they can’t afford them.

Episcopal raised $20 million to move to a new 123-acre campus this year. They have a state-of-the-art stadium with artificial FieldTurf.

Their athletic complex includes squash courts, a rowing tank and an indoor pool where kids played water polo while the football game was going on.

It’s also not about weather, either. Or traffic.

“It’s just always been that way for the Inter-Ac,” said Brian McCloskey, an assistant coach and 1982 Penn Charter graduate who was the head coach when Matt Ryan was there. “I wish I could tell you why.”

It’s just tradition. That’s saying something for a league that includes the oldest continuous high school rivalry in the nation. Penn Charter and Germantown Academy have been playing since the 1880s. Episcopal was founded in 1785.

The schools don’t worry about the loss in attendance. By the second quarter Friday, about 200 fans had filed into the bleachers, which seat home and visiting fans on the same side. Among them was Villanova basketball coach Jay Wright, whose son Taylor plays quarterback for Episcopal.

“People look for ways to sneak out of work early on a Friday,” Foley said.

They definitely don’t worry about the loss in gate receipts. There is no gate. Fans are admitted free.

Parents invest some $20,000 a year for their kids to attend Penn Charter. Foley said they don’t need to pay to get in a football game. Money for athletics comes from the school’s budget.

And Penn Charter’s campus doesn’t have a fence around the football field either. It’s surrounded by old oak trees.

“It’s an open campus,” Foley said. “You’d have to fence it in and gate it. That’s not what it’s about.”

There was no concession stand at Episcopal. No program, just a stack of printed rosters on the first row of bleachers for the taking. No band or cheerleaders … or even a PA announcer.

The only food to be found was getting cold on tables under the bleachers where team mothers prepared a postgame meal of tomato pie and mac-n-cheese for the Episcopal football team.

Mike Ryan chuckled.

“It’s not exactly Georgia,” he said.

He got a glimpse of Georgia’s high school football scene in August, when the Falcons scrimmaged at Mill Creek.

“It was beautiful,” he said. “It looked like it could hold 10,000 people. Southern football is different than what happens in Inter-Ac.”