September 12, 1982

AS the National Football League begins its 63d season today, the d ifferences in the styles of play of the two conferences has all but d isappeared. It was not always thus. As recently as 1969, when such present prodigies as Lawrence Taylor, George Rogers, Marcus Allen and Cris Collinsworth were in the third, fourth or fifth grade, there were two rival leagues, the N.F.L. and the A.F.L. The American Football League teams joined the N.F.L. in 1970 to form the bulk of the American Football Conference. A decade earlier, when their rivalry began, the leagues were a world apart. The older, established N.F.L. played a conservative game. The upstart A.F.L. threw the ball like a basketball and, because defenses were new and seldom cohesive, touchdowns were cheap and the scores were often like basketball scores.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. WHAT you first notice about Bill Walsh, coach of the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers, is the weariness. During the football season, his face becomes the color of unbaked dough, and he continually tilts his head to one side like a martyr in a medieval painting. He is either suffering badly or burning up inside from a private calling. Whatever the cause, his face drains of blood. A week before the start of the 1982 football season, the sun shines harshly on the headquarters of the 49ers here. Walsh emerges from a pitch dark room where he has been studying game films. The weariness is already on his face. A cold sore has been forming over his lip and his right ear lobe is raw and flaking. Walsh has agreed to answer a few questions about his impact on professional football, but when someone asks him to be specific, a frown takes hold of his square features and he becomes impatient.

Churches and synagogues have been beset with special problems in these days of high energy costs because of their lofty cathedral ceilings and leaky stained-glass windows that waste vast amounts of precious heat. Other difficulties are posed by the need for extensive lighting -both outdoors and indoors - and the fact that a lot of extra fuel has to be used to heat spaces that are used for services or classes only once or twice a week.

HUNTINGTON ''I thought we'd better get the citizens back into what they did in the old days,'' said Inspector Harold McCormick of the Suffolk County Police Department. ''When I became commander of the Second Precinct here a year ago, whenever I had a call asking me, 'What are you doing about these burglaries?' I threw the question back and asked, 'What are you doing?' '' But the inspector himself was surprised at the success of the rapidly growing Neighborhood Watch program, to which he attributed a good part of the credit for a 21 percent drop in the precinct's burglary rate from July 1981 to July 1982. The Second Precinct, centered in Huntington, contains a population of 200,000 in an area of 100 square miles and is patrolled by 20 police cars. Inspector McCormick estimated that 15,000 people belonging to 40 units took part in Neighborhood Watch programs. The members of a Neighborhood Watch unit stay in their homes - or, if they go outside, on their own property -and keep a sharp eye out for suspicious events in adjacent driveways, front lawns and backyards.

JERSEY CITY IN THIS city, where politics often seems to be the vocation or avocation of almost everyone, there are many tales of bitter political feuds that have wrecked lifelong friendships, split families along political lines and played havoc with seating arrangements at weddings. But none of these feuds has lasted as long, or involved such bitter ironies, as the one between John Longo and J.Owen Grundy, whose friendship was forged - and eventually destroyed - by their zealous participation in reform politics. The feud between the two, both now septuagenarians, has been going on since the early 1940's. Mr. Longo, the son of immigrant parents, and Mr. Grundy, the son of a distinguished local family, first met in 1925 at Grammar School No. 12. ''J.Owen was an intellectual, an orator, and I followed him,'' Mr. Longo recalled. ''I wanted to know more about Mayor Frank Hague and why he had so much power.''