Few sports games last more than a year.

The ones that do live past that expectancy rate (Tecmo Super Bowl, MVP Baseball 2005, NFL 2K5, et al.) survive because they have something unique about them -- something that no other sports game on the market can offer.

Aside from its stellar gameplay, in-depth customization and balanced team-building system, the one thing that has allowed All-Pro Football 2K8 to maintain its position as the game of choice for many die-hard football fans is the strong community that has formed around its online leagues.

It's a strange phenomenon, not simply because All-Pro Football 2K8's leagues include the same set of tools that came with NFL 2K5, but because we've reached a point where 2K's old league system is no longer innovative -- rather, it's expected.

What makes All-Pro Football 2K8's leagues special, then, isn't so much the features that shipped with the game, but the features that the die-hard community of players has added to it.

So if you're one of the people who brought All-Pro Football 2K8 home for a "getting-to-know-you" session, then promptly threw her out of the house by the end of the weekend, you might have missed out on what makes the game so good -- what's kept me and my brethren playing the game for a year and a half, without rest.

Understand that I'm no a fool; I realize that those of us who are still savoring the All-Pro Football experience make up a dying breed in the gaming population, because we're the "gameplay guys."

The mode we spend the most time with isn't the ever-popular franchise mode, it's the bare and basic practice mode, where we can watch the game engine in all its naked glory, undress the game code line by line, fawn over its aspects of brilliance, or argue over its spots of imperfection.

But this article isn't for the "field rats" like myself, who obsess over animations and A.I. tendencies that the average player will never notice; rather, it's for the people I've talked to who have admitted that All-Pro Football 2K8 gave them a better on-field performance than its competitors, but they still didn't want to bring All-Pro Football back home to meet the family because it lacked the “franchise mode” that they needed to maintain a long-term relationship with the game.

Well, I may not be old enough to be your father, but I'll have you know, that while you franchise freaks were out there messing around with other games that have half the brains of All-Pro Football and who knows how many diseases, the gameplay gurus like myself stayed faithful to the girl who wouldn't make us tear our hair out in frustration, and could satisfy us on a level that goes deeper than any Brad Johnson pass ever could.

So we kept playing All-Pro Football 2K8. And since conversation seems to spill over into online matches, the stat-addicts who loved the gameplay of All-Pro Football -- but just couldn’t live without player progression, roster management and trophy cases -- started talking about what the APF veterans could do to help ease their cravings and keep them from falling head-first into the pit of adultery.

Well, after a few months of brainstorming, the franchise geeks finally found a way to fit their precious mode into what had been a gameplay-only kind of girl; they called it the NFL Progression League.

And today, we're 20 owners strong, one week into our fourth season.

What we do in the NFLP league is take the existing NFL franchises, use a little creative liberty when it comes to their names/logos, remake their uniforms using the game’s team-builder tools, and replicate the 11 best players on each NFL team's real-life roster.

When the teams are set and the rosters get validated by the league commissioner, we pool all these teams into divisions based on geographic regions.

We then make our own schedules, (weaker teams get easier schedules, stronger teams get harder schedules).

Unlike the leagues in some recent sports games ( for example, NBA 2K9 and the EA football games), All-Pro Football 2K8's leagues -- regardless of their size -- can be completed quickly and efficiently, because the game's flex scheduling feature allows teams to play anyone on their schedule at any time, regardless of where the rest of the league is at schedule-wise.

In between games, owners like to write up team reports and type out game recaps, which help add a little bit of flavor and drama to all the league happenings.

The articles are a lot easier to write thanks to the 2K servers, which keep all the stats for us, and at the end of the year, we even hand out awards to the top performers in the league, whom the owners vote for privately.

Then, after all the awards are handed out, our players progress and regress based on their performance during the season (hence the name of the league), and older players even start to deteriorate as their age eats away at their physical abilities (the really old ones even have to retire).

We also make trades, draft rookies and sign free agents to fill in the gaps on our rosters. Sometimes an owner retools his team completely if the style he started the season with isn't working for him.

Essentially, the beauty of a league like this is that it is only limited by the imagination of us, the users.

If this all seems like overkill for a fake video-game league, then we also have the storied CFL, where 18 NCAA teams compete for a national championship in either the Big VI, the SEC or the Independent conference.

Whereas the NFLP defaults to the normal 16-game NFL schedule, we use a shortened eight-game schedule in the CFL, which really heightens the tension of each game, since every weekend can potentially make or break your shot at the national championship.

Another aspect that makes this league unique is the coaches poll we do at the end of the year, which determines who gets to go to what bowl game (all teams with a record of .500 or better are bowl-eligible).

As in the NFLP, the coaches also have league-wide votes that determine who gets to walk away with one of the many storied positional awards, such as the Heisman, Butkus and Biletnikoff trophies (just to name a few).

While CFL V is about to wrap-up, and NFLP IV is just underway, those are just the two major "imitation" leagues in All-Pro Football 2K8 that use the game's customization tools to re-create real teams and real players.

However, many other leagues exist that use the game's default list of 240 legends, such as the Doomsday Defense League, which allows only bronze players on the offensive side of the ball and really taxes your ability to move the ball with your play-calling instead of simply relying on your star players to bail you out and make all the plays for you.

Other long-running leagues like Dynasty Legends use the existing list of 240 legends but have added even more players to the draft pool (yes, there’s an actual fantasy-style draft), such as Deion Sanders, Lawrence Taylor, et al.

The All-Pro Football 2K8 community has made it this far, and unless a competitor -- be it 2K itself or from some other company -- puts out a better-playing football game, our fictional leagues might just end up eclipsing the real NFL in terms of how many seasons go down in the record books.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for an All-Pro Football league today!

If you don't have the game, now's a great time to give it a chance, as it can be had for about the price of a foot-long sandwich.

And if you give some of these online leagues a chance, I'm sure All-Pro Football 2K8 will last you a lot longer than any sandwich ever could.

NFLP -- "Franchise mode" league with NFL teams.

CFL -- NCAA league with bowls and coaches poll.

Doomsday Defense -- Challenging league for bronze-only offenses.

Dynasty Legends -- The definitive legend league. Uses all 240 default legends plus many more that the game left out in a "fantasy style" draft.

-- Jayson Young, owner of the Nashville Gladiators (NFLP II Champions) and Nashville Swashbucklers (CFL III runner-up)