They came, they saw, they endured and they conquered.
Michigan football is on the mountaintop of eternal glory with their names etched in stone with the best programs college football has had to offer over the years.
Once the clock hit all zeroes, everything changed.
Going from championship hopefuls to conquering heroes, the best of the best.
National champions.
A title you can never take away from the program.
Foes can sit around and sob into keyboards about vacated wins or asterisks, throw grenades from afar at the program, and somehow try to intrinsically link Connor Stallions to the success of this season.
None of it matters anymore.
All arguments are null and void.
Let's play the numbers game, a fun mental exercise for those who still can't wrap their heads around the fact that there's nothing more that can be said about the U-M program moving forward.
9, 2, 18, 4, 2.
Those are the rankings the Wolverines won games over to cap off the year. All the while two of those wins were achieved by an acting head coach after a showing of cowardice by the Big Ten Conference.
All wins accomplished after a 'scandal' threatened to derail a promising season after Stallions was an afterthought to the team.
There's nothing more you can say about the U-M program. A championship is a championship.
The pause in the void is the voices of all those who desperately wanted to see the program fail falling silent.
That peace you feel is Jim Harbaugh conquering the final demon that had loomed over the U-M program for decades.
For all the dark times, the sun will shine a little brighter in Ann Arbor from now on.
And, even then, there's nothing anyone can do, or say, to take that away from any of the players, coaches and staff to change that.
With those clamoring for the proverbial NCAA 'hammer' to drop that will never come and to those who think there should be some sort of tainted label or asterisk by U-M's names in the record, the coming weeks and months will be long and lonely.
The Michigan Wolverines are natural champions, fair and square, and there's nothing anyone can do to take that away.
Victors valiant. Conquering heroes.
And, now, officially, Champions of the West.
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