Sometimes, as I lay awake at night pondering the meaty issues of the day, I find it hard to believe that this is my 32nd professional football training camp.

I certainly didn't feel that way a week ago. Today, after about 10 days of being at Gillette Stadium from dawn 'til dusk (and a few late-night desk shifts thrown in), it feels like my 320th.

But much like today's players, who have no idea what a pro football camp was all about back before the days of the four-game preseason schedule and the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement, I shouldn't whine about it. This is a walk in the park compared to the summer of 1977 that I spent in Smithfield, R.I.

Training camp is nowhere near as long now as it was then, when I was a raw rookie writer of about 100 fewer pounds and possessing 100 percent ignorance of what the NFL was all about.

Back then, there were six weeks to be spent at Bryant College alone - and believe me, Bryant wasn't the university and cosmopolitan destination then that it is today (and I use that term loosely). There also were six preseason games to endure, four of them played before things settled down into a regular-season routine. Now there are just a little more than three weeks of actual "training camp" before teams shift into their in-season mode. And the number of double-session practices has shrunk to barely a third of what players used to endure back when Bill Belichick entered the NFL as a non-paid "gopher" assistant with the Baltimore Colts in 1975.

"Things have changed a lot since that first training camp in 1975," Belichick said earlier this week when he was asked about his early days in the league. "Teams would bring 30, 40, 50 rookies and have a camp with them for a while, a week or 10 days. They would take the best players that they needed out of that group and put them with their veteran players, so it was a pre-camp camp."

It's difficult to think of the 1970s as ancient history, but in fact, the NFL was undergoing something of a metamorphosis at that time. Salaries were increasing, fan interest was burgeoning, and the league that had played second-fiddle or worse to Major League Baseball for most of its existence was blossoming into an entity that would eventually become the model for all other sports to follow.

Along the way, the methods of training changed radically. Players now made enough money that they didn't have to hold down full-time jobs in the offseason. Rather than let them sit around and vegetate, the teams began to demand (without really doing so formally) that they show up to their training camps in shape.

That evolution resulted in the genesis of offseason conditioning programs, multiple minicamps, passing camps and the like. The players hay have successfully negotiated a shorter training camp season in the CBA that's currently in place, but they traded less camp time for more time under the watchful eyes of their employers throughout the rest of the year.

"It's a full-time job and a good one," Belichick said. "So you get a lot more done in the spring now. Training camps are a lot shorter, two-a-days are a lot fewer ... but there's a lot more work done in the spring in terms of your team installation, meetings, training and conditioning."

Yet Belichick still gets cross-eyed looks from younger players, kids who've had the silver spoon in their mouths from Pop Warner to the present, when he tells his tales of what the league was like just three short decades ago. To them, it seems like three centuries ago that players had to work real jobs in the real world to make ends meet from January to July.

"There are a lot of things they don't understand," Belichick said. "They have no idea. I remember when I came into the league the rookies carried all the players' travel bags. Now everyone does everything for them."

As the youngest coach on the Colts' staff, Belichick had his share of distasteful duties in 1975 that wouldn't be expected of someone in a similar position today.

"The youngest coach on the staff carried the film projectors," he said, "so you're lugging around those big 16mm projectors through the airports and the hotels. Now, we carry six trunks of video equipment, but there are no projectors any more." And you can be certain that no coaches today would lug any of those crates into the stadium.

It was also a leaner time for NFL rosters. Rather than the 53-man rosters that make up today's 32 teams (and coaches all agree they don't have enough players), "during the regular season the roster sizes were 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, around there," Belichick said. "There is no practice squad or any of that. You were about one and a half deep, really. You had one team and then a couple backup offensive linemen, a back-up receiver and a backup running back. You had two tight ends, but there were no long-snappers and all that.

"And (the current players) look at you like... 'yeah, that was back when there weren't facemasks,'" he said.

Fortunately, the Patriots have a coach who is also a football historian, a man who has lived the last 34 years of the league's history in person and who is well-versed in what came before him. That's one of the reasons why Belichick embraced the idea of bringing this year's rookie crop of players to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, for a quick lesson in the history of their league.

"It's a great experience for the players to see some of the history of the game and of their teams and of the players that went before them, either in their position or on their team," Belichick said. "There are so many guys that have made the game so great for us, and players and coaches that have paved the way, and to understand that and have an appreciation for that is outstanding.

"We try to do that ourselves ... not to that degree, but having former players talk to them and making them aware a little bit of some of the things that have happened before they got here," he added. "Really, rookies need to understand that there was a game before they arrived. It didn't just start when they showed up in town."

I coudln't agree more.

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com. Read Farinella's blog, "Blogging Fearlessly," at thesunchronicle.com/sports.