GLENDALE, Ariz. _ Needing four yards on fourth down to have a chance to put defending national champion Clemson away, Ohio State coach Ryan Day decided to punt the ball back to a golden-locked quarterback who has never lost a college football game.
Trevor Lawrence needed to go 94 yards in three minutes to keep his remarkable unblemished record and advance the Tigers to their second consecutive title bout. It took him 1 minute 18 seconds, and four plays, the last a clever quarterback keeper-turned-quick pass to the electric Travis Etienne, who blazed into the end zone for his third touchdown.
On the ensuing drive, Ohio State's comeback attempt fell flat when a pass from Justin Fields sailed into the arms of Clemson safety Nolan Turner in the end zone.
The Tigers won 29-23 in a College Football Playoff semifinal in the Fiesta Bowl that felt every bit like a national championship tilt against the heartbroken Buckeyes, who did everything they'd been building toward Saturday night except beat Clemson.
The Tigers' reward for winning their 29th in a row? A CFP final match with No. 1 Louisiana State on Jan. 13 in the Superdome in New Orleans in front of tens of thousands of rowdy Cajuns.
For Ohio State, Saturday night was three years in the making. On New Year's Eve in 2016, Clemson systematically slaughtered the Buckeyes 31-0 inside the same shiny and silver desert orb that's now called State Farm Stadium. Three days later, Urban Meyer hired Day, then an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers, as his co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
It was no secret to Meyer, who won two national championships at Florida and one at Ohio State, that the Buckeyes needed to continue to evolve into a team that might play and reside in the Big Ten Conference but more resembled a Southeastern Conference program in the way it was built. The 2016 humbling only reinforced how far Ohio State still needed to go.
The Buckeyes just needed more time _ and perhaps a little luck. Meyer exited the stage last year in the aftermath of scandal, leaving the program in Day's hands, which became much more capable when quarterback Fields transferred from Georgia to Ohio State and was granted immediate eligibility by the NCAA to play in 2019.
Fields, a Kennesaw, Ga., native with exceptional speed and physical grace, fit right in with the skill players Ohio State was already collecting from locales strategically outside the Big Ten footprint. The Buckeyes plucked running back JK Dobbins and wide receiver Garrett Wilson out of Texas. Wide receivers Chris Olave (California), KJ Hill (Arkansas) and Binjimen Victor (Florida) rounded out a core of non-Midwesterners that Woody Hayes never would have believed necessary for Ohio State to have a puncher's chance against a powerhouse from the South.
So, in the first quarter Saturday, when Dobbins burst through a hole and outran the back end of the Clemson defense for a 68-yard touchdown to give the Buckeyes a 10-0 lead, more meaning was attached to it than one could understand if they didn't cheer for a traditionally plodding Big Ten school.
"68 YARDS THROUGH THE HEART OF THE SOUTH," exclaimed a tweet from the Twitter account of "Eleven Warriors," an Ohio State fan site.
Ohio State jumped out to a cathartic 16-0 lead, but Dabo Swinney never allowed Clemson to panic. He trusted his players, some of whom had helped him the Tigers win two of the last three national titles. Swinney is the first to admit that he doesn't have to go very far to stock his roster with blue-chippers, especially now that the results match the Southern charm.
With five straight trips to the CFP, Clemson has changed the meaning of the verb "Clemsoning" from shrinking in the biggest moments to rising to any occasion. All the Tigers need is a window and they'll blow right through it. That opening came in the second quarter when Ohio State cornerback Shaun Wade was called for targeting on Lawrence, extending a drive the Tigers dearly needed.
They'd score a touchdown on a nifty eight-yard cutback run by Etienne, and before too long, the leggy Lawrence would be chugging down the field for an improbable 67-yard touchdown run that cut right through the heart of any earlier notion Ohio State had truly caught up to Clemson.
In the third quarter, the Tigers continued to run away from the Buckeyes on a 53-yard touchdown pass from Lawrence to Etienne in which the running back took a screen pass and did all the work himself.
Clemson's 21 unanswered points _ well on the way to 2016's 31 _ begged the question: Could the Buckeyes retake what was theirs in the first half? And if they couldn't, if this juggernaut Ohio State team wasn't good enough, what message would that send to all the other teams located north of the Mason-Dixon line?
The Buckeyes did answer once, on a Fields pass to Olave that put them up 23-21 with 11:46 to go. But Fields could not answer Lawrence, the sport's unicorn of a quarterback, a second time.
