It didn’t have the history of the Manchester city championship or the draw of a Nashua North–Nashua South game. But one of the state’s few remaining Thanksgiving Day games will not be played this year – and perhaps ever again.

After three years of Turkey Bowls, the Goffstown and John Stark football teams canceled their holiday showdown this season. It ended a brief tradition that started in 2003 when the Generals played at Goffstown as a club team and continued the last two years – both John Stark victories – when both participated in Division III.

While the decision to call off the exhibition game was shared, the two teams’ desire to continue the fledgling annual event was not.

After years of dealing with dwindling player numbers in the practices between the end of the season and Thanksgiving, as well as the conflict it caused with winter sports starting at the same time and the increased risk of injury, Goffstown athletics director Howard Sobolov and head coach Rob Cathcart agreed the Turkey Bowl wasn’t something Goffstown wanted to pursue in 2006.

Cathcart expressed the team’s feeling to John Stark athletics director and head football coach Bill Raycraft in a June phone call. In the following weeks, the two organized a scrimmage game in its place, played during a preseason jamboree.

Players and coaches from John Stark, however, hardly shared the Grizzlies’ sentiment. Playing in what Raycraft said was the team’s “bowl game, our playoff game” the last three years, the Generals rarely ran into a problem of attendance at practice, said senior captain Adam Lantiegne.

In fact, Raycraft said he contacted several teams to try to schedule a replacement game, but schools such as Merrimack Valley and Raycraft’s alma mater, Bishop Brady, have rules against playing on holidays, while officials at Division-I Trinity seemed weary of playing down to D-III Stark, Raycraft said.

Though Goffstown made the move to Division II prior to this season, Cathcart said “if we were Division III, it would be the same rationale” for not wanting to play the game.

The possibility of injuries, for example, played a bigger role. Sobolov said that two years ago, the hockey team lost its starting goaltender for nearly half the season when he broke his hand in a football practice preparing for the Thanksgiving Day game.

“And if the kids aren’t into it, and that’s who the game is for, I don’t think we should force them to play an exhibition game,” Sobolov said. “To be honest with you, there wasn’t an outcry from anyone on our team.

I haven’t heard it from one kid that, ‘Gee, I wish we were playing on Thanksgiving.’”

Goffstown senior Mike Przekaza agreed, saying the “majority of the team didn’t really think of it as a big deal because it was just a fun game and it didn’t really count toward anything.”

But the game’s cancellation highlighted a trend in the Granite State: Thanksgiving games outside of Nashua and Manchester – which features West and Central this season – usually don’t survive.

Merrimack and Souhegan square off and NHIAA Executive Director Patrick Corbin said Portsmouth and Dover have scheduled a game for Thursday, Nov. 23.

But unlike Massachusetts and Connecticut, where seasons start later and a Thanksgiving game is actually part of the regular season, New Hampshire’s current system doesn’t bode well for holiday match-ups.

And, Corbin added, “there isn’t a lot of demand or push from the communities” to change things.

In Sobolov’s opinion, the town of Goffstown never completely embraced the game; he estimated half as many Grizzlies fans showed up on Thanksgiving when compared to the crowds the school enjoyed during its playoff season in 2005.

Raycraft, on the other hand, said he received phone calls just last week from community members not associated with the program asking when the game was being played.

Cathcart and Raycraft both said they don’t see the teams reviving the game next year, but both coaches, as well as Sobolov, said they’d love to continue the rivalry in some way, even if that meant a preseason meeting.

“But,” Lantiegne said, “I guess going to turkey dinner after beating up on Goffstown always tasted a lot better.”