It’s a game of inches.

That seems to be last Saturday’s lesson, the day Oklahoma’s national title hopes appeared to evaporate into the thin air of the Rocky Mountains.

Juaquin Iglesias was open over the middle, “in the seam” as Bob Stoops described Tuesday, right where they wanted him, but Sam Bradford’s pass was inches too far forward. Iglesias tipped it, a Buffalo caught it, and the snowball did nothing but gather speed the rest of the second half.

If the question afterward was how it happened, the answer, even three days later, seems to be, well, these things just happen.

If the Sooner Nation can accept such a notion, it should rejoice all the more in the 2000 national championship and the achievements that allowed OU to play for two more under Stoops’ watch.

Because even for a great team, winning every game is hard.

And therein lies the pretext to Saturday, the Saturday after that, the Saturday after that and, perhaps more than anything, the Saturday after the regular season ends. Because that Saturday is Dec. 1, on which day the Big 12 will be decided when South meets North in San Antonio.

Gone may be the Whole Enchilada, but a conference title is well within reach and if even a little of what they were saying about this conference before the Sooners’ Boulder Bungle is true — how it was OU and the 11 dwarves; how the whole league is down outside of Norman; how OU is bound to be favored in every game — then getting to the Alamodome should be the new standard by which this team is judged.

The question the Sooners have to ask themselves, or simply answer for everybody else, is this: are they for real?

Just how good Texas might be isn’t very important. The Longhorns, like they were not so long ago when it comes to this series, are nothing but an impediment.

Already, Mack Brown is involved in some familiar obfuscation. Usually he waits until a Cotton Bowl loss to skirt issues, but when asked what’s plagued his offense to date, he said the Longhorns were scoring enough points but “I think the standard and expectation at our school, as well as Oklahoma, is so high it’s hard to live up to.”

And here everybody else thought the problem was Texas barely got by Arkansas State, beat Central Florida by a field goal and was throttled by Kansas State.

Still, it’s Texas’ issue, not OU’s.

More important to the Sooners whether or not Stoops was blowing smoke when he went on and on about his team’s intangibles, how it went about its business so robotically and how it would be the last kind of team on which a player would be flagged 15 yards for pulling an opposing player’s hair or for interfering in punt coverage, as happened to Curtis Lofton and Jermaine Gresham against Colorado.

Stoops went from showering praise in the pregame to calling his team “not very smart” in the post, and even Tuesday left it unresolved on which occasion he had pegged his players correctly.