Of all the potential outcomes from Clemson’s first burst onto the national championship stage at this time four years ago, we’ve got to admit that annoying dynasty is the one we never saw coming.

But if Clemson beats No. 1 LSU in Monday night’s College Football Playoff championship game, the best bet of the whole evening is that coach Dabo Swinney and his players will launch into a thousand diatribes about how disrespected they felt all year by the media and how even after their third national title in four years, no one believes in Little Ol’ Clemson.

And the rest of us will be rolling our eyes.

What Clemson is on the verge of pulling off Monday is almost incomprehensible in the modern era of college football, a run of dominance that only Nick Saban’s Alabama and mid-1990s Nebraska have been able to match over a four-year period.

But perhaps the reason we’ve had trouble comprehending it is because Swinney has spent a good portion of the year tilting at windmills, railing on supposed critics who wondered why quarterback Trevor Lawrence got off to a slower-than-expected start this season or picked at their weak ACC schedule or ranked them behind teams that had undeniably accomplished more.

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Dabo’s season of verbal pugilism culminated after his team had beaten South Carolina to end the regular season, the Tigers’ 27th straight win.

“It’s huge from a national standpoint, because obviously if we lose this game, they are going to kick us out,” Swinney said. “They don’t want us in there anyway. We’d drop to 20, you know? Georgia loses to this very same team, and the very next day it’s, ‘How do we keep Georgia in it?’ We win to the team (North Carolina) that beat South Carolina and it’s, ‘How do we get Clemson out?’ It's the dadgumest thing. So it's big. You know, they can't vote us out. We gotta go 30-0. We ain't got no choice. Because we don't play nobody.”

Unfortunately, the smallness of that rant and others like it this season has obscured the really big thing Clemson is on the verge of accomplishing.

When we think about the programs that defined eras in college football, all of them had one thing in common: They didn’t act like underdogs. Nebraska would physically beat you to a pulp. Miami’s in-your-face swagger was a cultural flashpoint beyond football. Florida State would tell you how much better they were than you coming onto the field and then go back it up. Everything about Alabama’s vibe made it seem like the only way they could lose is if they beat themselves.

It would be a shame 20 years from now to think about the Clemson era and only remember the whining.

Because when you think about what the Tigers have already accomplished, and what they might add on Monday, it’s truly one of the remarkable stories in college football history.

Clemson isn’t some big, behemoth flagship state university with a ton of natural advantages. Rather, it’s a modestly-sized school of 25,000 students that often feels like going to summer camp once you exit Interstate 85 and drive about 12 miles to a campus tucked between the Blue Ridge foothills and Lake Hartwell. It doesn’t have a big, national fan base. It’s not even the flagship university of its own state.

Before Dabo, Clemson was largely known as a somewhat underachieving program with a devoted fan base for whom its blip of national prominence in the early 1980s was slipping further and further from memory. It had fallen behind its traditional rivals in facilities, in recruiting and didn’t seem to have any real path to breaking out of college football’s upper-middle class.

So to go from that to this — the best facilities, the nation’s highest-paid head coach, two national titles, a 29-game winning streak and the No. 1 ranked incoming recruiting class — almost seems impossible to believe. And maybe even Clemson itself doesn’t believe it because they certainly don’t act like anyone else who has traveled this path.

When this run began back with a close national title game loss to Alabama in 2015, Swinney had to prove he could knock that door down against Alabama. He did it the following year. Now here we are, and Clemson isn’t the underdog anymore — it’s the bully on the block and the standard for the entire sport.

That comes with some natural backlash. Fans get tired of the same team winning all the time — just ask Alabama about that — so many of the things that made Clemson cute and cuddly when they first came onto the scene are now tired and clichéd. (We know there’s a slide in the football facility. We’ve seen Dabo do goofy dances on social media. It’s more fun than Alabama. We get it.) That’s just the way it goes in sports when you’re the Patriots or the Yankees or the Warriors. People root for you until you win too much, then they root against you.

But that’s not disrespect, as Swinney claims. That’s the ultimate kind of respect.

Clemson began this season as the consensus No. 1 team in the sport and will finish in the national championship game. During the season, it’s probably true that Clemson didn’t get as much attention as it has in previous years. Part of that was due to LSU and Ohio State putting together historic regular seasons. Part of it was that even with a couple less-than-stellar performances by Clemson standards early in the season, everyone kind of assumed they’d be there at the end no matter what.

Ultimately, the only reason Clemson flew under the radar was the extent of its dominance. The ACC wasn’t good, 12 of Clemson’s 13 games weren’t particularly competitive and there was little reason to watch until the Playoff. Now they have our undivided attention again.

But somewhere along the way, Little Ol’ Clemson died, even if Swinney goes way overboard trying to revive it. LSU may be favored in this game, but by now everyone should know going in that it will take a monumental effort to knock down this winning machine.

And if Clemson wins three titles in four years in the Playoff era against the quality of opponents it has had to beat, it will be universally described as the greatest stretch in the history of the sport. Hopefully that’s enough respect for Dabo.