FORT WAYNE – So maybe this is as good as it gets, if you’re Notre Dame in this roiled new age of college football. There’s your heretic’s thought for the day.

There’s a notion to set the ground shaking beneath your feet, as Rockne and Leahy do triple toe loops in their graves. Ara won’t be happy. And Lou Holtz, who annually sees the Irish going 12-0, will be reduced to an epithet favored by his broadcasting compadre, Lee “Ah (Bleep) It” Corso.

Imagine, Notre Dame aspiring most years only to 8-4 and the Footwear/Power Tool/Radioactive Snack Food Bowl. Ah, bleep it.

And yet, that seems to be where we’re heading.

I say this even though there is now abundant evidence that Notre Dame football is on one of its periodic upticks, of which there have been a few in the decade-plus since Holtz left and his successors were left to sustain greatness in an era of more stringent academic and competitive realities. Now it’s Brian Kelly at the wheel, and the reputation that preceded him – a guy who could get it done in today’s college football – seems to have legs. The Irish are better this year than they were last year, and they were better last year than they were in Charlie Weis’ dreary final days.

And they’re still a young team.

Several emerging stars on their defensive unit – defensive ends Stephon Tuitt and Aaron Lynch and linebacker Troy Niklas – are freshmen. Running back George Atkinson III is a freshman. And if Kelly’s benching of sophomore Tommy Rees for sophomore Andrew Hendrix in the Stanford game might have opened the door to a quarterback controversy … well, two more years with not one but two capable quarterbacks at your disposal is not exactly a dour prospect.

So the Irish have that going for them.

What they don’t have going for them: The emerging Super SEC, the emerging Super Pac-Whatever, the emerging Super Big Ten For The Mathematically Challenged.

Tectonic plates are grinding away in the landscape of college football, and even if Notre Dame chooses to remain aloof from it all – and the day will come when they simply won’t be able to anymore – it will feel the effects. It already has, these past dozen or so years. You can see it virtually every time it plays a USC or a Stanford, and you’ll really see it should it if the Irish ever wander into the crosshairs of an Alabama or LSU.

Those schools just have better athletes, or at least more of them. And they’re likely always going to, given Notre Dame’s business model – Harvard in the classroom, Pittsburgh Steelers on the field – and the direction college football is heading.

This is not to say the Irish won’t jump up and strap a 10-2 or 11-1 season on everyone some years, and maybe even next year. But the best-case scenario likely will be a lot of years that look like this one, when the Irish beat the teams they were supposed to beat and lost to every ranked team they played except Michigan State.

And long term?

They can probably be a Stanford, provided another Andrew Luck turns up and (miracle of miracles) chooses South Bend over Palo Alto. Whether they can be ’Bama or LSU or even the Notre Dame of 20 years ago, however, is a dreamer’s notion, considering Notre Dame has appeared in the top 10 in only four of the last 15 seasons, and not at all in the last five.

Notre Dame: We Can Be Stanford.

Doesn’t exactly sing. But then, the day for arias is done.