Indiana wins a national championship that is almost too much to fathom
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Maybe sometime this month or this summer or this century, all the fans and alumni widely known as Hoosiers and all the people who follow college football might scale a deeply human mental hurdle about the rousing theater of Monday night. They might find a way to believe what they saw.
They might believe the gobsmacking truth that when a storybook five months ended, the confetti in Hard Rock Stadium rained down Indiana crimson-and-cream. Many of the 67,227 might comprehend that, indeed, as the videotape shows, they hung around with their joy and their goose bumps and belted out “We Are The Champions.” They might grasp that they heard a revolutionary 64-year-old coach in his second Indiana season tell of “waxing tables” among the unglamorous tasks of a Division II coach a decade ago, at which time, of course, “I never really thought this was possible.”
By reliving, reliving and reliving Indiana’s stirring 27-21 win over a bruising Miami, they might even manage to believe this: Indiana, which spent a century-plus buried so dimly in the American football consciousness that it seemed less an afterthought than not really a thought at all, won the national championship Monday night, yet exceeded even that delirium. It elbowed its way into thousands of future conversations about the best teams and stories in all sports lore, given its dizzying ascent to a dazzling precision that seemed to stir up out of the dust. Its 27-2 run through two playoff seasons, and its 16-0 trek through this one, will float above college football and enter some sort of realm near the 1969 New York Mets, or the 1980 United States Olympic men’s hockey team, or the 1999 St. Louis Rams or, if we’re going to get global about it, 2016 Leicester City F.C.
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