Friday Night Lights just started its final season and I already miss Tim Riggins.

Tim Riggins was the last character I expected to love: A brooding football star too troubled to work hard and too pretty and popular to pay the consequences.

As most of the original characters have graduated and moved on from this small West Texas town (or at least off the high school football team), Riggins stayed, matured and became as compelling a character as any on the show. But life has a certain inertia, and no one escapes their fate so easily. Just as Tim was ready to start a better life, he confessed to running a chop shop to save his brother and his new family.

It's hard to say what will happen in the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights, which premiered Wednesday night on DirectTV. But if the fourth season seemed to have the world crashing down around most of the characters, we like to hope season five will be about rising to the occasion.

Coach Taylor is still heading up the underdog East Dillon Lions, and their win over the better, richer and stereotypically asinine Dillon Panthers was one bright spot in a season of struggles. Football has always been both a central figure and a metaphor on FNL, a vehicle in which Taylor could instill in his players the importance of hard work, the value of teamwork and the hope for a better future in a hopeless town.

It might be unrealistic, but I'd love to see them make a serious Cinderella run at a state championship. I'm not holding my breath, though — unrealistic doesn't seem to be in these writers' vocabulary. The Lions won a game in the first episode of season five — but it took knocking out the opposing quarterback to do it.

After being embroiled in scandal after counseling a teen with an unexpected pregnancy, Tami Taylor has resigned as principal of Dillon in exchange for her previous job as a counselor at East Dillon. There may be another round of turf wars between the spouses, but I expect most Taylor family drama to come from the departure of daughter Julie to college. Like departing seniors before her, Julie is getting her farewell arc, alongside dork-made-good Landry and even the imprisoned Tim Riggins.

For every character than says good-bye, FNL always seems to find a couple new ones to worm their way into our hearts. Who knew Vince, an arrest-prone punk with some talent, would prove so amazing as he worked to lead his team, take care of his addict mother and survive the gang wars of his neighborhood. And the abortion plotline between Becky and Luke was the most forthright and honest depiction of the topic perhaps in the history of television.

There are new faces — a bad girl named Epyck for Tami to tangle with and a new wildcard talent on the football team, basketball-loving Hastings Ruckle who disses King Football — but what we're concerned with are resolutions. Can everyone win, get scholarships, go to college and marry their high school sweethearts?

That just wouldn't be the Friday Night Lights we know and love. That's OK, guys. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.