IRVING, Texas -- It's a pleasant spring afternoon, and football is in the air at Texas Stadium. Not the usual time of year for it, but this isn't the usual practice session. It's the set of the season finale of "Friday Night Lights," and the vibe is laid-back.

Taylor Kitsch and Zach Gilford, two of the show's Dillon Panthers, toss a football around with director Jeffrey Reiner. Scott Porter, who plays a paralyzed former quarterback, is showing just how ambulatory he really is by doing cartwheels on the sidelines. Extras mill about, many of them playing reporters.

Watching the action is T.J. Griffin, a former player for Trinity High School in Euless, Texas. Griffin says "Friday Night Lights" gets it exactly right, especially in the interaction between Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his players.

"That's where it's at - having that trust," says Griffin, who's now a salesman for IBM and a motivational speaker. "It's way better than any other sports show I've seen, because it's not really about sports. It's about the relationships. Football just has to be there."

Oh, yeah - Griffin is in a wheelchair. Has been since 1990, when he broke his neck during a game. His brother, Tony, is a production assistant on the show and helped snag T.J. a visit to the set. His story is eerily similar to Porter's character, Jason Street, who was paralyzed making a tackle in the first episode.

"That first episode, I called all my friends and said, 'You gotta watch this. It's like a documentary of what happened that night,'" Griffin says. Even Street's rehabilitation process, while accelerated for dramatic effect, hit home.

"I used to call Tony and say, 'Tony, did you have a microphone in the rehab room for some of the conversations we used to have? Because y'all are nailing this,'" Griffin says. "They completely did it the right way."

You could hardly find a more forceful endorsement of a show, especially one with a fragile future.

"Friday Night Lights" is about a bunch of scrappy underdogs trying to end their season on a strong note and come back as contenders next season. It's also about football.

Despite critical acclaim and a loyal fan base, the show's fate is as unclear now as it was when the cast and crew came to Texas Stadium in March to film the season finale, which airs Wednesday.

Most of the "FNL" folks are optimistic about the show's chances for renewal, and it got a boost last week when it won a Peabody Award. But renewal hasn't happened yet, and Wednesday's episode could be a finale - period.

"Everybody who watches it seems to love it and be so into it, and our viewers have held steady through the entire season," says Gilford, who's a lot more talkative than Matt Saracen, the shy quarterback he plays on the show. "So it's frustrating. It's basically not knowing whether or not you're going to be unemployed. Also, since it's a job everybody loves and cares about, it's like the show NEEDS to be back. It's a quality show."

When it debuted in October, "FNL" already had the odds stacked against it. It stood in the shadow of a good movie and an even better book, but was not a replication of either, moving the locale from the real Odessa to the fictional Dillon and updating the story from the late `80s to the present. It benefits from the involvement of executive producer Peter Berg, who directed the "FNL" movie - and happens to be a cousin of H.W. "Buzz" Bissinger, who wrote the book. But except for Chandler, the cast was made up of mostly unknowns, and the 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday time slot put the show up against established hits "Dancing With the Stars" and "NCIS."

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