And then some.

To make matters even more pressing, the bus carrying the team to the high school in Buffalo’s northern suburb arrived 40 minutes late because of Friday rush-hour traffic, but O’Brien appears unfazed. After unloading equipment from the bus to the locker room, he then transports it to the visitors’ sideline, a mission that requires several trips.

Then, O’Brien hears someone say, “phone.”

He checks his pockets and his cell is nowhere to be found. Undaunted, O’Brien keeps working. It’s been his game-day ritual for 25 years, a labor of love for his alma mater that shows no signs of coming to an end.

“I want to be here a long time,” he affirms four days after the Red Raiders defeated the Red Devils, 23-21, to move to 3-1 on the season. “I love it. I love being here.”

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O’Brien can’t get enough football.

Maybe it’s because he could never play it growing up. He was too small.

“I wrestled as a jayvee in 10th grade at 97 pounds,” said O’Brien, who is a 1982 JHS graduate. “I was small and I had curvature of the spine and I couldn’t compete. The doctor said that someday I was going to grow, or I was going to be the hunchback of Notre Dame. I graduated at 5-10, 140 pounds.”

John O’Brien is all smiles as he prepares for Jamestown’s football game at Clarence last Friday night.

In order to “scratch his football itch” during his teenage years, however, he did the team laundry, using a washer and dryer at the school a couple of days a week as a favor to former Hall-of-Fame coach Joe Sanfilippo.

“I was a behind-the-scenes guy,” O’Brien said.

By the time he reached 30, however, he found himself in a more visible place, attending every Jamestown varsity and junior varsity contest he could, and working the chains for the jayvee games. And when one of the junior varsity coaches had to leave in the middle of a game one day to accompany an injured player to the hospital, O’Brien offered to help out.

“That’s how it started,” he said.

O’Brien, now the married father of three teenagers who have all helped their dad on the sidelines at one time or another, has never looked back.

“John is just a staple of Jamestown football,” varsity coach Tom Langworthy said.

Along the way, O’Brien has witnessed all four of Jamestown’s state championships and has kept stats for some of the finest players in Western New York history. Every rushing yard, pass completion and tackle is meticulously recorded on a piece of paper mounted on a clipboard. When each game ends, O’Brien totals up the stats and then emails, texts or calls WNY media with a report.

“You can’t put a label on what he does and you can’t even quantify it,” Langworthy said.

By the time all his jobs were completed after last Friday’s trip to Clarence, O’Brien got home at 1:15 a.m. That was almost 21 hours after he woke up so he could be at work in the maintenance department at Jamestown Community College by 5:30 a.m. Eight hours after that, he was at Jefferson Middle School loading all the football equipment on the bus for the football game that night.

“Without any interruptions, you give me an hour, I can have everything out and waiting for the bus,” O’Brien said.

The work is hardly glamorous, and O’Brien’s name is never announced on the public-address system before a game, but his role in the operations of Jamestown High School football cannot be overstated.

“He’s as recognizeable as anyone in the program and as valuable as anyone on our staff,” Langworthy said.

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O’Brien was 9 or 10 years old when he first fell in love with football. He was particularly fond of the players in the Louisiana State University program.

“We only had three channels (on the TV at home in the early 1970s),” he recalled. “LSU was playing Kentucky and they were No. 1 (in the country). They had that tiger (mascot) in a cage, they ended up beating Kentucky and I liked the color purple back then.

“That’s kind of how I got sucked into (football).”

So, when I received O’Brien’s text message at 10:02 p.m. last Friday, I couldn’t help but smile. His cellphone, which had come up missing hours before, had been found on the bus, allowing him to report his stats like always.

“Once I found it, it was a relief,” O’Brien said.

It’s also a relief to Langworthy that he has O’Brien on his sideline, because although it’s been 45 years since the latter first embraced purple-clad LSU, it’s pretty clear what colors he favors now.

They would be Red & Green.

“When I got hired in 2008, it was probably within days of the season,” Langworthy said. “Obviously, it was new. Everything was new to me. I was talking to (assistant coach) Ryan Calkins on the phone. I was 27, ‘Calk’ was 30, and we were trying to get it right.”

So Calkins, a former all-state player for the Red Raiders in the 1990s, reminded Langworthy about O’Brien’s contributions to the program and suggested that he — Langworthy — give O’Brien a call.

“I think that meant a lot to him,” Langworthy said. “When he started to come around, we started calling him ‘Coach O’Brien.’ I think that really solidified what he was all about.

“You don’t ever take it for granted, because he’s such a great guy, but at the same time, there’s so much he does, sometimes it’s hard to even recognize all of it.”

Heck, O’Brien even knows how to put together a mean place setting.

“We have a tradition (on Saturday mornings) that the booster club buys donuts after a win,” Langworthy said. “John sets up the table and puts the napkins out.”

The job titles — equipment manager, statman, coach, waiter and friend — seem to get longer with each passing season.

“He’s just invaluable,” Langworthy said. “He’s just ready to do that dirty work, the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

Well, John, your contributions to the Red Raider football family are a secret no more.