OK. Now it can be football season.

Now the Alabama and Auburn football teams can see if they’re capable of competing for championships, too, individually or collectively. They have a lot to live up to.

As if 60 wins, two Elite Eight spots, another Final Four trip and the first 1 vs. 2 matchup in SEC history hadn’t already stamped the just-completed hoops season as the greatest in the long history of the Iron Bowl of Basketball, the final AP poll added the cherry on top.

Auburn finished No. 4. Alabama came in at No. 6.

For the first time, the Tigers and Tide put together parallel top-10 seasons. For the first time, each team had a legitimate shot to win a national championship in the same season. The dream of the ultimate IBOB was only one Auburn win and two Alabama victories away.

That it didn’t happen, that Alabama’s road ended in the Elite Eight against Duke and Auburn’s run expired in the Final Four against eventual champion Florida, doesn’t diminish the rare air they breathed together.

This wasn’t a bolt from the blue. It was the next logical step in the rivalry’s unprecedented progression. Since 2018, Auburn has won five SEC championships and reached two Final Fours. Since 2020, Alabama has won four SEC titles and advanced, in the last three years, to the Sweet 16, the Final Four and the Elite Eight.

Since 2018, Auburn or Alabama has won the SEC regular-season crown or tournament title or both every year but one. Since 2020, Auburn leads the SEC with 146 overall victories. Alabama is second with 145.

Two years ago, Alabama was the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. This year, Auburn earned that distinction, and the Tigers followed the Tide’s first Final Four ride of 2024 with their second, the state’s third, in the last six postseasons.

That’s the stuff of Duke and North Carolina. It’s been an unprecedented parallel run of excellence in this rivalry with no end in sight. As long as Bruce Pearl and Nate Oats stick around, expect both programs to put themselves in consistent contention for more championships until one of them hangs the biggest banner of all.

Maybe one day, Auburn and Alabama can both be as good in football as they are in basketball.

It sounds strange when you say it that way, but this is a case where truth is stranger than fiction. The schools of Bear Bryant and Pat Dye have basketball coaches that have won multiple SEC championships and football coaches in search of their first. They each have a basketball coach that has been two wins shy of a national championship – twice in Auburn’s case – and a football coach that has not made the playoff in his current position.

To be fair to Kalen DeBoer, he did lead Washington to the National Championship Game two years ago, but as he discovered during his first season in Tuscaloosa, Alabama is not Washington. The SEC is not the Pac-12, and not just because the SEC still exists.

To be fair to Hugh Freeze, he inherited the wreckage left behind at Auburn by Bryan Harsin, but he has yet to clear the debris fully to construct a winning season through two years on the Plains.

Alabama missed the playoff last year for the third time in six seasons, a continuing development made even more egregious because it was the first year of the 12-team postseason. Auburn has gone three straight seasons without being ranked in the AP poll for a single week for the first time since 1965-67.

It’s been 12 long years since the Mother of All Iron Bowls. Alabama rolled into Jordan-Hare Stadium on Nov. 30, 2013, as the undefeated No. 1 team in the nation en route to a national championship three-peat. Auburn awaited as the one-loss No. 4 team ready, willing and able to make history.

Thanks to the Kick Six, it did.

Auburn fell one stop shy in the National Championship Game and finished No. 2 in the country. Alabama let the Auburn loss take the air out of its balloon, dropped its bowl game and ended at No. 7.

That 2013 season remains the best collective finish for the Iron Bowl of Football combatants in the nine years each team ended a season in the top 10. Their combined final AP ranking of 9 is one spot lower – thus better but barely – than the combined finish of their basketball teams this season.

Maybe the Auburn basketball team’s history-making journey will inspire Freeze and his football team. He was there in person in Atlanta to witness the Tigers beat Michigan in the Sweet 16 and Michigan State in the Elite Eight and then traveled to San Antonio to see them come up a painful shot and stop short in the Final Four.

It doesn’t appear that DeBoer made a similar trip to New Jersey to watch Alabama basketball in the East Regional, but his football team could learn something from Oats’ blue-collar work ethic.

At the moment, Auburn and Alabama have basketball coaches that rank among the best in the country in their sport and football coaches striving to get closer to the top of their profession. Pearl and Oats have set the bar. The upcoming football season should give us a pretty good indication whether Freeze and DeBoer are capable of reaching it.