MUNCIE, Ind. – The pale blue sky is painted with streaks of pink, providing a picturesque twilight canopy over an idyllic Midwestern football setting.

The air is ridiculously warm for this time of year – fans are grilling and drinking outside Ball State’s Scheumann Stadium in shorts and T-shirts. They won’t be cold for a minute of a November night game. There is no wind, no rain, no discomfort whatsoever. It is a pristine evening.

“Kind of like Sunday at The Masters,” mused Western Michigan coach P.J. Fleck. “The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you’re just happy to be alive.”

This had to be the first time Tuesday night MACtion in Muncie was ever compared to Master’s Sunday at Augusta National, but that is Fleck. One man’s gritty post-industrial town is his Amen Corner. He can make Western Michigan’s hometown of Kalamazoo seem like Camelot.

Paradise is wherever he’s standing at the moment.

Few people watched Fleck’s undefeated Broncos blow out Ball State, 52-20. Not in person (attendance was just 5,614) or on television (the game was played opposite Game 6 of the World Series). But that small scale actually enhanced the purity of the night.

Visiting WMU fans crowed in the sparsely populated stands late in the game – “We want ‘Bama!” one yelled – and then hung around to congratulate the Broncos. Fleck thanked them for coming. Buses idled nearby, ready for the ride back that would return the team to campus at 4:15 a.m. Wednesday.

View photos P.J. Fleck has Western Michigan 9-0 and in prime position for a New Year’s Six bowl. (Getty Images) More

It was the kind of night where you wish you could stop time. Don’t let the clock budge forward another minute. Because these things never last. Not around here.

If you know the shelf life of mid-major, Midwestern football success, you can appreciate the fragile beauty of the moment.

After crushing the Cardinals, Western Michigan is 9-0 for the first time in school history, is one of five remaining unbeatens, is ranked in every Top 25 and is reveling in its status as the Cinderella team of 2016. If they keep winning, a program that has never been anything but a bit player in the postseason could well wind up in the Cotton Bowl. The Broncos have taken their school, fans and town where it has never been before.

The inevitable byproduct of that will be the departure of P.J. Fleck.

There will be bigger stadiums, brighter lights and more money in his future – almost assuredly as soon as next season. But Fleck should be mindful of what he strives for, and appreciative of the fleeting joy like Tuesday.

Eight years ago I was at the exact same stadium, watching another undefeated Mid-American Conference team. Ball State was putting the finishing touches on a 12-0 regular season by routing none other than Western Michigan.

The excitement was rampant. The coach was Brady Hoke. It was the last game he coached in Muncie before heading to San Diego State for two years, then to Michigan for an unhappy four years that ended in his firing.

Ball State is on its third coach since Hoke, having gone from Stan Parrish (6-19) to Pete Lembo (33-29) to first-year coach Mike Neu (4-5). Any momentum from that 12-0 regular season is long gone, though some facility upgrades remain.

Hoke probably wouldn’t change a thing about his career path coming out of Ball State – he made a lot of money and had a couple of good seasons. But if you administered truth serum, he might tell you he never had more fun as a head coach than that 12-0 season in Muncie.

I believe the 35-year-old Fleck will have a better head-coaching career than Brady Hoke. I believe he’s ticketed for stardom, blessed with a charisma that makes him a formidable recruiter and galvanizing motivator. He may not go from the MAC to multiple national titles like Nick Saban (who coached Toledo) and Urban Meyer (Bowling Green), but I sure don’t want to be the person who tells him he can’t.

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