My first thought after Drew Allar winged the ball out of bounds to secure a 27-24 Notre Dame victory over Penn State, the second New Year’s 6 win for Marcus Freeman in a week, was pretty simple:

How did that happen?

ND just beat a top-5 team basically with duct tape, Krazy Glue, Gak, paper clips and Post-It notes. Think about that. ND fans were dying for wins like this for a generation, and with fans not having any idea where a big play might come from at any point in the game, Marcus Freeman and his staff pulled it off.

How did a Notre Dame team beset by even more injuries, a couple of horrible turnovers, two interceptions wiped off by penalty, a nonexistent first-half offense and a sometimes-leaky defense pull off a semifinal win for the ages and send the Irish to the national championship game?

I don’t have a good answer for you and if you’re looking for cohesive thoughts, sorry, they’re not coming. But what I can tell you is how that game ended was pretty damn poetic. Did you notice how some of the most-maligned and most-questioned Notre Dame players were huge contributors down the stretch?

Jaylen Sneed

Jaylen Sneed has been a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma since the moment he arrived on campus. Why isn’t he playing? we asked. Why isn’t he playing more? we asked later. Why isn’t he better? we asked once he started playing a lot.

This year, he’s been terrific, and tonight he made the biggest play of his life on a delayed blitz. He appeared to be playing what appeared to be a spy on Drew Allar on the pivotal interception before taking off, beating the Penn State guard to his left, and forcing Allar into a rushed pass.

Christian Gray

For much of the season, Christian Gray’s been the guy the other team attacks. Gifted and athletic but prone to penalties and having the misfortune of being not quite as awesome as Ben Morrison and later Leonard Moore, Gray has had to “be a goldfish,” as Ted Lasso might say, an awful lot this season, and he has been.

Boy, was he a goldfish Thursday. His was the first of two ND interceptions wiped out by penalty (his own), but he did his job otherwise and was there when Allar threw it into a danger zone.

Riley Leonard

Riley Leonard will be (and was) the first to tell you he was not very good most of the Orange Bowl – a lesser man would have nightmares about potentially ending his college career with the terrible second interception he threw – but he made some critical plays when the time came. He lowered his shoulders for extra yardage. He found Jaden Greathouse after a PSU defender slipped. And on a third-and-short as ND tried to set up the game-winning field goal, Leonard – on a crazy creative and gutsy call by OC Mike Denbrock – rolled out and found Greathouse again to make the field goal (relatively) easy.

ND converted 11-of-17 third downs in this game, in large part because of Leonard’s hard-nosed runs and clutch-when-he-needed-it passing.

If Riley Leonard came to ND in hopes of upping his NFL draft stock, it didn’t work. But if he came to ND hoping to become a college football legend, he’s one win away from doing exactly that. He’s a special leader and I couldn’t have anyone else as quarterback of this Irish team.

Mitch Jeter

It wasn’t Mitch Jeter’s fault Notre Dame lost to Northern Illinois in September, but the lasting image of the game was his final field goal being blocked. Then a few weeks later, he got shelved with a groin injury and ND’s kicking game went into the tank. It had to have been hell on him.

Since the playoff started, he has been note-perfect. What an incredible, amazing, storybook penultimate chapter for ND’s transfer kicker. He drilled both his kicks again tonight, again both from 40+ yards. It’s like nothing ever happened at all.

Steve Angeli

It might be a footnote in the game, but I hope it isn’t: Steve Angeli had to come in after Leonard briefly went to the concussion protocol late in the second quarter, and all this guy – largely dismissed by some fans, seemingly doomed by his own coaching staff to be a perpetual #2, easily could have hopped in the portal the second it became clear he was being recruited over – did was stabilize the game, deliver pinpoint passes (and yes, dodged a Bullet Bill-sized disaster when his team somehow managed to recover his fumble) and get Notre Dame 3 points when things were teetering badly. And you might have noticed the winning margin was 3 points.

So many others

I feel bad for not listing pretty much every player on ND’s roster, because they needed every last one of them to pull this off. (Seriously: HOW DID THAT JUST HAPPEN?) But I’ll try to get a few out here.

Tosh Baker has been a ND whipping boy for so long that a current NFL offensive lineman bulled his way past him on the depth chart during his career and he’s still here, and he came in for Anthonie Knapp and did a terrific job stabilizing things at left tackle.

Jeremiyah Love was limited as I expected, but had one of the most badass runs I’ve ever seen in my life to score a go-ahead fourth-quarter touchdown, and I hope it’s been made clear by now that that dude is not just a speed demon, he is a balls-out physical runner when necessary.

Mitchell Evans was all ND had going for it on offense early in the game, and he held things together early on, keeping a bad offensive half from being worse.

Aneyas Williams is one of the best #3 running backs you could ever have. He totaled 83 yards, including one of the game’s biggest plays when he went deep and caught a pass from Leonard. He’s a gem. I can’t wait to see more of him.

Greathouse has barely been part of the Irish game plan all season, but with Beaux Collins having vanished from the roster after the first series of the game, he stepped up and delivered big catches. His breaking one guy’s ankles and making a man miss in the PSU secondary will be replayed for the rest of time.

This coaching staff

I’m utterly lost for words at this coaching staff. The only thing that kept me from falling into a pit of depression as the walls seemed to be caving in around the Notre Dame season at 10-0 was that this staff might be able to figure out some answers. And they did it. Al Golden managed to limit the outside zone plays that were shredding the ND defense to pieces. Mike Denbrock managed to devise a way to keep the PSU pass rush at bay. They managed to, somehow, someway, put together a game plan seemingly on the fly to win this game.

It wasn’t ND’s best game of the year by any stretch. But maybe that’s what makes it all the sweeter. The Irish took a punch from a good team with something to prove – several punches, in fact – and got off the mat and responded, even without their best.

This is a run Notre Dame fans will remember forever no matter what happens in Atlanta. It’s a run that I never dreamed possible after Sept. 7, when I and so many others unofficially put Marcus Freeman on the hot seat. It’s a dream season, with a dream team and a dream coach. It’s the kind of Notre Dame team we have waited for decades – that some of us have really never seen. We craved it. We hoped for it. We didn’t know if we ever got it. And we got it.

What now?

I frankly have no idea what to think of the next step. This will be an unprecedented national championship game: ND’s 16th game of the season, against a really great team that will be healthier and more talented than they are. They’ll be underdogs, maybe by more than a touchdown.

However it ends, it’s been magic. But this coaching staff has me believing anything is possible. If they can take this team from where they were Sept. 7, with what they’ve dealt with since then, to this point, why shouldn’t I believe a national championship – a title I’d frankly given up hope I’d ever see, a title that would be the pinnacle of my sports-fan life – is possible?