“The art of fiction is dead,” veteran New York sports reporter Red Smith wrote in 1951, after Bobby Thomson’s home run beat the Brooklyn Dodgers for the pennant. “Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly implausible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Smith covered baseball. Had he lived to witness Indiana’s 38-3 demolition of Alabama in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day and 56-22 destruction of Oregon a little over a week later in the Peach Bowl, he might have written those words again. When ESPN‘s Rece Davis asked Hoosiers head coach Curt Cignetti to describe his program’s transformation from college football‘s most reliable laughingstock to the nation’s consensus No. 1 team, Cignetti gave a two-second pause before delivering the only honest assessment: “It’d be a hell of a movie.”