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Over the weekend, ESPN treated Ohio State fans to a sight for sore losers, er eyes.
The advent of the College Football Playoff brought the advent of a new power Alabama was going to have to worry about.
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The Buckeyes ran all over the Crimson Tide in the Sugar Bowl (281 yards rushing) and over Oregon in the CFP championship (296 yards).
As Urban Meyer stood there amid the confetti, and amid his staggeringly young team, how many folks out there would've guessed Clemson and not Ohio State would ascend to a more exalted place over the next five seasons?
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Because that's exactly what has happened. The Tigers went to the playoff five straight years, played for the championship in four of them, and brought two national titles to Pickens County.
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Meyer got back to the playoff only once, 2016, and probably would've preferred his team not made the final four after a 31-0 humiliation in Arizona at the hands of Dabo Swinney.
Ryan Day did masterful work last year after Meyer's abrupt departure, getting a loaded team back to the playoff and 16 points up on the Tigers in Arizona.
But they couldn't close the deal, and thus the floodgates of one-way ridicule remain open from Clemson fans to their Ohio State counterparts who don't need a DNA test to know the identity of their father.
Clemson has exactly what the Buckeyes want. It has exactly what they and everyone thought they were going to have as they celebrated that resounding run to the 2014 national title.
And when their best was not good enough last year, when they gagged away numerous opportunities to put Clemson away and then ended the game by throwing an end-zone interception, you start to wonder if Ohio State is facing more than just the 2020 Clemson team Friday in New Orleans.
You wonder if those guys in the orange helmets are in the heads of the Buckeyes.
We've seen Clemson exist on the other side of such a phenomenon before. South Carolina had some exceptional teams and talent from 2009 to 2013, when the Gamecocks took five straight games from Clemson.
Even Steve Spurrier himself would acknowledge late in the run that the Gamecocks weren't that much better.
Strange, uncharacteristic things happened in 2012 and 2013 when Clemson was at least on even terms with South Carolina on paper.
The Tigers came unglued at home in 2012 and allowed a backup quarterback to walk out of Death Valley with a double-digit win.
The next year in Columbia, six Clemson turnovers told the story of a 31-17 Gamecock win.
The Tigers were wound too tight in those games. They spent all year making them too big, too monumental, instead of just going out and playing football.
You wonder if the same thing might be going on with Ohio State as it makes avenging last year's loss in the desert an all-consuming goal.
After Ohio State returned home last January, the Buckeyes' strength coach put the final score of the Fiesta Bowl in the team's weight room. When the Big Ten decided to pull the plug on football a few months ago, one of the big laments out of Columbus was that they weren't going to get another shot at Clemson.
When offensive lineman Wyatt Davis and defensive back Shaun Wade elected to opt back in upon the conference's season reboot, the way last year ended was a prime motivator.
Day has said receiver Chris Olave, who ran the wrong way on the play that ended in Nolan Turner's end-zone interception, might not have eaten solid food for three or four days after that loss.
The Buckeyes and their legions of followers already had a special hatred for Swinney, in large part because the people you hate the most are the people you can't beat.
But now the disdain might've doubled after Swinney ranked the Buckeyes No. 11 in his coaches' poll ballot on the premise that six games should exclude a team from the playoff.
