Here’s the thing about this season. It’s not last season.

And it will never be last season.

The feel-good story of the fall (or, now, winter) will only be Sooner football if Oklahoma beats West Virginia Jan. 2 at the Fiesta Bowl.

Maybe only if the Sooners beat the Mountaineers bad.

It doesn’t have to make any sense in black and white

Indeed, last year’s trip to the desert didn’t.

Because on the face of it, one of the nation’s great programs falling to the first mid-major ever to reach a BCS bowl, and on three novelty plays at that, would appear to be nothing but an embarrassment. Except for the fact that anybody who was there the week the season began, when the reigning Holiday Bowl MVP and one of his offensive linemen were removed from the team, knows OU made its season by reaching and winning the Big 12 title game. The slipper finding Cinderella couldn’t undo it.

Paul Thompson will never be the quarterback who lost to Boise State. He will forever be the unselfish kid who turned a season on the brink into a conference championship.

The level of accomplishment might be the same this time around but the mood is something else entirely.

Losing to Colorado and Texas Tech doesn’t make OU special. Everybody remaining accused of being the best team in the nation stubbed their toe twice, too. But they were still two games the Sooners dropped to inferior opposition. This time around, reaching the Big 12 title game felt like the consolation prize.

No the night they won it, the Sooners were so good, but the euphoria has passed.

It’s not very fair. Bob Stoops shouldn’t ever have to apologize for winning one of the game’s best leagues. It just won’t quell the Sooner Nation this time.

It’s not one of those perception-being-reality things. It’s more like Sooner football operates in alternate realities. One history resides in the media guide, while the other is a purely oral tradition. Here, we’re talking about the latter.

So much of how anything is remembered is about how it felt at the time. A year ago it felt great to be there for OU. The game felt more like an exhibition, separate and apart from the regular season. Fans couldn’t have liked how it ended, but the emotion was disbelief rather than failure.

Well, losing to the Mountaineers (… again! Don’t you know some of the longtimers remember Dave Hostettler and 1982 all too well) will feel like failure. West Virginia has become a regular in the top 10 and the BCS and still the Mountaineers remain so, well, West Virginia.