Has it really been a week? Seven days? One hundred and sixty-eight hours, give or take, since Michigan ended Alabama’s 2023 football season on the last play on the first day of 2024?

Time does not fly when you’re not having fun and not jetting to Houston for the National Championship Game. That is, unless your idea of frivolity is dancing on the Crimson Tide’s grave while awaiting the arrival of your Fourth and 3 tee to combat your cousin’s Fourth and 31 shirt at the Fourth of July Family Divided Reunion.

College football season never ends here. The games may stop for eight agonizing months, but the competition will continue apace and ablaze.

While it feels like ages ago that Nick Saban and his organization shotgunned themselves in the foot throughout the Rose Bowl, up to and including their last snap in overtime, it didn’t end the season for everyone. There is one more game to play this evening with no dynasties in sight.

There will be no Alabama fighting for its fourth big ring of the four-team playoff era, no Georgia shooting for a three-peat, no current or future SEC team sucking up all the oxygen in the midst of a confetti celebration. For the first time since the first season of the four-team postseason, when Ohio State beat Oregon, two teams from outside the Southeastern Conference footprint will play for it all.