CLEMSON | Two years ago, the anguish from a thumping in New Orleans did not last long.

Trevor Lawrence was already in the building when Clemson returned to it in early January of 2018. And it would not take long during spring practice for the coaches and just about everyone to comprehend that everything was going to be different from that point forward.

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The recent loss to LSU, in that same building in that same delightfully strange city, is less than two weeks old.

But, strangely, the pain and suffering does not reverberate the way you'd think for a program that loses so startlingly seldom (twice in the past 37 games, to be exact).

Dabo Swinney and his staff just keep moving on, somehow keep plowing new ground. They continue to remind the most decorated of peers that Clemson might lose every once in a while, but it's not going to lose ground. That the Tigers aren't going anywhere as it relates to residence at the top of college football's mountain.

In September of 2004, this writer was in College Station covering his third Clemson football game as a full-time beat writer for The Post and Courier newspaper.

A press-box elevator attendant was curious about the visiting team that would be thrashed later that night.

"Clemson," she said. "Is that in Alabama?"

Fifteen-plus years later, maybe there are still some geographically-challenged people out there who couldn't find Clemson on a map.

But thanks to a positively astonishing run on the field, which starts and continues with a positively astonishing run on the recruiting trail, we all know where this program resides in the consciousness of a sport.

Squarely in the center of it. Squarely at the top of any hierarchy devised by any observer paying remote attention.

Upstate, and upscale.