Greetings and salutations, MGoCommunity. If you're of a certain age here, you might recognize my username. I used to be a prolific poster here, and for a good number of years even had my own blog ("Genuinely Sarcastic") that used to occupy a certain corner of the MGoUniverse.

If you have memories of such things, you may find those diary post with some level of excitement. If not, well, then I'm just another elated Michigan fan sharing some heartfelt thoughts on the crowning achievement of our fandom.

I hope you enjoy.

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Who’s got it better than us?

For a long time, that was a sarcastic joke. For a long time, many, many others had it better. For many years, “those who stayed” were, in fact, not champions.

I have vague, fuzzy, blurred memories from my formative years of Tim Biakabutuka running for 313 yards. Of Shawn Springs slipping on the Ohio Stadium turf as Tai Streets ran for a touchdown. I remember Charles Woodson’s punt return. I remember his interception in the Rose Bowl endzone. I remember sitting with my father as a boy, watching Michigan win the national championship. Beating Ohio State and winning championships. Events that seemed normal as a child became fleeting and scarce as an adult.

In the 26 years that have passed since that moment of glory in the fading Southern California sun in college football’s most hallowed cathedral on New Year’s Day 1998, many things changed. The fortunes of our beloved football program went in a largely negative direction. The warmth of a father basking in a championship with his young son faded, withered by the strains of life and the frailties of humanity, always susceptible to darkness. We are never more than five minutes away from a ruined day, should we indulge the darker recesses of our minds and our souls.

In 1999, Michigan played musical chairs at quarterback when one of those quarterbacks would eventually become the greatest football player in history. In 2000, Michigan lost three games, all of which they led by double digits.

In 2003, special teams blunders directly led to two losses that would prove to keep Michigan out of the national title game. The person responsible for those blunders was an obscure special teams grad assistant who had never coached before and, after being jettisoned mid-season, would never coach again.

Had you told a Michigan fan in 2003 that that season would be the last win against a non-crippled Ohio State team for nearly 20 years, would they have believed you?

Would any Michigan fan have believed that Drew Henson’s touchdown in 2000 in Columbus would mark the last U-M win in Ohio Stadium for 22 years?

As the 20th century turned into the 21st, the inevitability of victory over Ohio State turned into the inevitability of defeat. It didn’t matter the state of the teams, the relative strengths and weaknesses, who was healthy, who was out, who was coaching. The score was always the same: Ohio State too much, Michigan not enough.

There was always a level of cheap indignity to it, too. In 2004, they sic’d the drug sniffing dogs on Michigan outside their stadium. In 2006, they allowed their own field to be an overgrown, carved up mess so Michigan’s defense would be disadvantaged all day. All against the backdrop of winning a championship on the back of a 100% ineligible Maurice Clarett and spending Jim Tressel’s entire tenure reporting violations every single year; the type of petty incentives that lure star recruits but never elicit punishment.

The “punishment” for Ohio State’s crimes finally catching up to Jim Tressel was one abortive year, dead-eyed sociopath Urban Meyer landing in their laps, and Tressel being carried off the field on the shoulders of his former players during the 2012 game against Michigan.

The backdrop of all of this is that it created a seemingly unkillable sense of fatalistic dread in the heads of Michigan fans. That nothing actually mattered. No amount of success for Michigan would ever change the last game on the schedule. No amount of malfeasance would ever topple the regime in Columbus.

Of course, in the midst of this, Michigan committed ritual seppuku. Lloyd Carr’s tenure atrophied to the point where he had no successor in place because no one was qualified, and his boss was still somehow caught off guard when he retired after 2007. So Michigan plunged itself into the abyss. 2008 through 2014 was not only embarrassing on the field, but it felt like scarcely a day could go by without something happening off the field that exposed this program to a sneering, laughing outside world.

Take a breath and try to remember all the off-the-field humiliations that occurred under the Rodriguez-Hoke-Brandon umbrella.

Remember the NCAA investigation, instigated by Michigan grads working for the Detroit Free Press, that proved beyond a doubt that Michigan’s bureaucracy was sloppy with paperwork and the football players probably stretched a little longer than they were allowed to.

Remember Rich Rodriguez channeling Josh Groban at the football bust – only to be mocked and rebuked by Groban himself!

Remember Michigan’s psychopath athletic director making a multi-day spectacle out of firing Rich Rodriguez.

Remember the time the Michigan head coach apologized to the Michigan State head coach because a Michigan player put a small piece of metal in some dirt – after MSU just brained Michigan 35-11.

Remember Michigan’s head coach, Brady Hoke, a thoroughly decent man, being dragged into the depths and forced to perform ritual debasement because his boss, AD Dave Brandon, was a soulless, lifeless maniac hellbent on destroying everything that made Michigan unique.

Remember that it took a protest on Michigan’s campus to overthrow the dictatorship that Brandon had turned the athletic department into.

I think there was a prevalent undercurrent of thought among many of us that this was something that would always be just out of reach for Michigan.

For almost an uninterrupted two decades, we got bullied and humiliated by Ohio State. History that outlasts most of us dictates that 2nd place in that rivalry means no championship for you.

And even putting that aside, the structure of college football as a sport as it unfolded in the 21st century always put that dread in many of our heads that Michigan's refusal to play the game the way others played it meant that there was a hard ceiling on our beloved football program. Ohio State runs roughshod over the rules, providing cars and incentives to players and recruits, self-reporting dozens of "minor" violations every single year under Jim Tressel, never suffering the consequences but always reaping the benefits. And then when they finally DO suffer the consequences, they have one down year before the most morally bankrupt elite coach in the history of the sport lands in their lap.

Alabama, one of the most renegade, rule-breaking programs in the history of college sports, nearly gets Death Penalty'd at the turn of the century, but instead they survive to hire Saban, who looks the other way as Alabama boosters in the Red Elephant Club conquer the South like an octopus spreading its tentacles.

Auburn blatantly and flagrantly buys Cam Newton and openly mocks the investigation during the season. Clemson's phony holy man cries about not wanting to live in a world where college athletes get paid while numerous Clemson recruits and players slip and post social media pictures of the years of themselves holding huge stacks of money.

We knew that Michigan never operated like this. I'm sure our program was never as squeaky clean as we pretended it was; but we all knew that Michigan wasn't dropping huge stacks of cash to land recruits. And seeing other programs that we knew were getting away with these things succeed unchecked created this sense of morose dejection that we were stuck.

Of course, adding to this misery as all of the above was going on was App State and Rich Rod and Toledo and Hoke and Brandon and then even when we finally got it right there was trouble with the snap and JT was short and 62-39 and 56-27, and that pygmy thing in 2020, and if JIM HARBAUGH couldn't get over the hump here, what was the point? If Jim Harbaugh couldn't win at Michigan, who could?

Justin Fields, a dead-eyed mercenary who loudly and proudly talked about not having any idea what campus life was like at Ohio State because all he did was football while taking some slapstick online classes to maintain the facade of “eligibility” and “amateurism”, said that Ohio State took the Game more seriously than Michigan did after bombing Michigan 56-27 in 2019.

In 2020, the bastardized COVID year, it felt like this thing of ours was destined to die a grim death. Michigan’s season was canceled, then uncanceled, and then players opted out, and then players got hurt, and games got canceled, and at no point did it look like Michigan was seriously interested in being on the football field.

The narrative of Jim Harbaugh’s first six years at Michigan was always “Yeah, but…”

The but was always the Death Star waiting at the end of November, because when you coach at either of these places, that game at the end of November is always the most important thing. Generations of people raised in these two states grew up with Woody and Bo, and then those people raised their children with stories of Woody and Bo. If you are inclined toward either of these teams, it is not a casual thing. It is woven into the fabric of who you are as a person. To truly understand this rivalry means you experience a rush of terror and fear and exhilaration at the end of November every year. John Cooper was a wildly successful coach at Ohio State and the only thing anyone remembers about him is his 2-10-1 record against Michigan. Ohio State ended up having to fire Jim Tressel (oh, excuse me, he “resigned”), and a year later they carried him away as a legendary hero, not just because he won a national championship, but because he guaranteed that he would fix Ohio State’s Michigan problem and then spent a decade doing just that.

How does Brady Hoke’s narrative at Michigan unfold if his teams manage to narrowly win games against Ohio State in 2012 and 2013 instead of narrowly losing, as they did?

Jim Harbaugh very rapidly restored Michigan to a solid level of respectability upon taking the job at the end of 2014. But none of that mattered because when you coach here the only thing that truly matters is the Death Star at the end of November – in this case, it was termed by some as “Mt. Columbus,” and through six years, Harbaugh had failed to scale that mountain. Tantalizingly close on a couple occasions, but it seemed to be getting steeper and more slippery, and for that reason, it felt like an insurmountable task.

Before the 2021 season, with his job on the line and almost unanimous opinion amongst media and fans being against him and his team’s prospects, Harbaugh declared that Michigan would beat Ohio State “or die trying.” No one paid this any mind at the time because no one viewed it as a realistic possibility. The assumption was that Michigan was a broken roster that would finish well down the Big Ten standings, take another ass-kicking from Ohio State, and then move on from Jim Harbaugh after the season.

Even as the season unfolded and Michigan appeared to have stopped the bleeding and even done things they hadn’t done in a while – wins in Madison and Happy Valley, most notably – scant attention was given to the odds of beating Ohio State. Because we had seen this story before. Michigan was 9-2 before the OSU game in 2015, 10-1 in 2016, 10-1 in 2018, and 9-2 in 2019. The result was always the same: Ohio State too much, Michigan not enough.

And then, something surreal happened. Under a gray, overcast sky, with snow coming down steadily from the skies of Ann Arbor, Michigan altered history. They altered history on the legs of an obscure 3-star running back who was a linebacker at one point, and the arm of a precocious low 4-star quarterback who was vastly outclassed in talent by his Ohio State counterpart, and the wall of an offensive line that was not composed of players who had been considered super-elite recruits, and the pure will and destructive determination of their best player, their superstar defensive end who has also served as one of the faces of the Lions’ renaissance.

Michigan 42, Ohio State 27. It was the moment we had dreamt of for so long, but had been denied. I cried in the arms of my now former fiancee, who was caught very much off guard; she had never seen me express such emotion. I had tried to explain to her previously how much this program meant to me, how much of my life had been forged under the shadow of Michigan football. She didn’t quite understand, because I don’t think you can accurately explain this thing of ours to someone who has not had their lives similarly forged.

And I thought of my dad, gone from this world for several years by then. We had drifted apart, we lost each other because neither of us understood the importance of family the way we should have. I don’t have a treasure trove of memories to fall back on the way many sons have once their fathers are gone. My dad never took me fishing. My dad never took me into the backyard to have a catch. For as stunted as our relationship was (before it collapsed completely), we found one tradition that fit both of us: for many years, we would make the trek to Ann Arbor for one Michigan game a year. This was a time before high quality camera phones, so the memories from these games are fuzzy and often blurred. I was somewhat crestfallen but also not-at-all surprised that the photos from these games contained precious few pictures of me and literally none of my dad. God forbid even the one thing that held us together would ever contain a picture of father and son enjoying the football game together.

So Michigan finally beat Ohio State, and finally got to experience football beyond November that actually mattered for the first time in a long, long time.

And then, even when Mt. Columbus was conquered, they got slapped around by Georgia in 2021 as a reminder that they were still the slow, unathletic nerds from the Midwest and this was still the SEC's sport.

To finally, finally overcome all of this, along with the over-heated signgate FAKE SCANDAL…

May it forever break the hearts and minds of our already broken enemies that nothing will ever take away what Michigan accomplished on the field in 2023. You can scream. You can howl. You can cry. But nothing will remove those trophies from Schembechler Hall. Your worst nightmares that you thought could never come true, they are real. The monsters under your bed are wolverines, and they are loosed upon the world. You wake up today under a maize and blue sky. You live in the era of Pax Michigana.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientist Francis Fukuyama spoke of “the end of history.” It was an ambitious and overly optimistic prognosis of the future, with America standing alone atop the world order. It has been thoroughly and depressingly disproven in the 30 years since he wrote it. But applying it to sports, the sentiment feels so familiar, even when we know that it too will be disproven. This is in fact not the end of sports – but who cares? There will be more games, and more seasons, and more champions. The overwhelming number of those champions will not be Michigan. There is in fact the real possibility that this is the final national championship any of us ever see Michigan football win. It took 50 years for Michigan to add another championship after 1948, and another 26 for us to find ourselves victorious under that beautiful Southern California sky. The past week has been replete with Michigan fans speaking of their childhoods, and how they came to be in this time and place, Michigan fans in 2023, waiting for that which we dared to dream for so long to finally manifest itself in the world.

When it was over, I found myself thinking once more of my dad. It’s been eight years since he took his own life, and in almost every instance when I thought of him in those eight years, it’s been in a negative context. I never got to resolve my relationship with him. It decayed and withered on the vine, and in the moment he chose to exit this world, he took from me the chance to ever reconcile. I am forced to live in this place where I constantly feel his shadow, but I can never repair what was left broken. Maybe if he had been a better father, I could’ve been a better son. Maybe I would have been a better fiancee. Maybe I could have ended up being a better person.

When the confetti began to rain down in Houston, Jim Harbaugh said that every piece of it told a story. And he was right. Because as it came down and Michigan was officially and formally the National Champions of College Football, all of us were there. All of us who are alive and vibrant for the moment, and all of us who have passed on without getting to see this, and all of us who are too young to remember that night but will be regaled with stories in the years to come. In that moment, the world of Michigan football was all there inside the stadium in Houston. Each piece of confetti was the story of a Michigan fan.

And for the first time since long before he died, I thought of my father in a positive light. Because I thought of how much joy he would’ve experienced. I think it would’ve taken him back in time to New Year’s Day 1998, sitting on the couch with his young son, watching Michigan win the Rose Bowl and the national championship.

A character on a popular television show once spoke of wishing people could know they were living in the good times before they were over. Michigan fans, we are there right now. These ARE the good times. This is Pax Michigana. We are living in the good times right now. They may be fleeting and they may end as abruptly as they began. But we are inside of our wildest dreams, and yes -- our fandom is complete. We may be in a Michigan winter covered by a gray sky, but let no man or woman make a mistake: we rise with a blue sky, illuminated by a maize sun.

Who’s got it better than us? The answer is nobody.

Go Blue