George Schroeder

USA TODAY Sports

BOULDER, Colo. — With practice finished, the players gather near midfield and take a knee. In a few more days, they’ll play the first of four November games that could turn a good season into something much more — which for this football program is a new and unusual circumstance. Mike MacIntyre’s parting message is simple.

“These games are gonna be more fun than you’ve had, I promise you,” the coach tells them. “Keep enjoying it. Keep enjoying it.”

Anyone who’s been associated with Colorado football these last few years — and this goes especially for those players from MacIntyre’s first recruiting class of February 2013 — gets the connection to an analogy the coach made back then. A proud program had fallen and, despite several coaching changes, couldn’t seem to get up. After seven consecutive losing seasons, including 1-11 in 2012, there wasn’t a lot to sell.

“The bottom had kind of fallen out,” says Darian Hagan, the former standout quarterback who’s now coaching the running backs.

MacIntyre’s pitch to that very first group of recruits wasn’t extravagant. In living rooms, he invited parents and prospective players alike to join him in strapping into a roller coaster. The bar would come down, and there’d be no getting off, and a long, difficult climb would begin.

“It’s gonna be hard,” he told them. “It’s gonna feel like we’re never gonna get to the top. And then all of the sudden, we’ll get there and — WHOOOOO!”

Sitting in his office with the view of Folsom Field and beyond that, the Flatirons, MacIntyre smiles.

“That’s what we’re doing now,” he says.

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This, finally, is Colorado football. After years of futility — and three seasons of building under MacIntyre without many positive outward results — the Buffaloes are screaming downhill, and greatly enjoying the ride. Colorado (6-2, 4-1 Pac-12 South) hosts UCLA on Thursday, already assured of a bowl berth for the first time since 2007, but wanting — and importantly, expecting — so much more.

“Usually this time of year, we’re playing for pride,” says senior quarterback Sefo Liufau, who admits to marveling a bit at the situation they’ve played their way into.

Now, they’re after — and this is hard to fathom — a Pac-12 championship. The Buffaloes are ranked No. 15 in the College Football Playoff Top 25 — and even that modest ranking sounds really good, considering that until this season, it had been 11 years since they’d been ranked in any poll. That’s 11 as in, Colorado’s current freshmen were second-graders back in 2005. That’s also the last time the Buffs won a conference division, the old Big 12 North, and played in a conference championship game.

In the last 10 years, Colorado was 33-88. Going into this season, the Buffs had won five conference games since joining the Pac-12 in 2011. They’re currently 4-1, atop the Pac-12 South.

It’s testament in part to patience; in MacIntyre’s first three seasons, the Buffaloes were 4-8, 2-10 and 4-9. It’s not just the records; there weren’t any real breakthrough victories, those bursts of success that indicate a program is improving. But those associated with the program say they saw the signs, even without wins.

“It’s been a lot of ebb and flow,” says Colorado athletic director Rick George. “We kept saying, ‘Stay the course, stay the course,’ because we knew we were making progress.”

Progress includes a total makeover in facilities, $156 million for the Champions Center, which rises from the northeast corner of Folsom Field to house the football program and the athletic administration, and next to that, an indoor practice facility. Colorado now has a centerpiece equal to or better than its major-college peers — an important factor in the recruiting race and in sustaining success.

Along with the program’s past, which includes a national championship in 1990, MacIntyre touts the combined benefits of Boulder as a college town in a gorgeous setting and Denver, 23 miles away, as a major metropolitan destination. Add the facilities and, finally, this dash of success, and he dreams big. The Buffs, he says, should be consistent Pac-12 contenders, “which gives you an opportunity to win a national championship, because if you win the Pac-12 championship you most likely are gonna be in the Playoff.”

More important in the building process, though, has been that first recruiting class. Measured in combined starts (412), this is the most experienced team in the program’s history. An important part of the nucleus is formed by players from that February 2013 class; 19 of the 23 guys who strapped into the roller coaster with MacIntyre remain. They rode uphill through three consecutive losing seasons.

“I think that’s really special,” MacIntyre says. “That’s really what’s made a difference. Developing (talent), the staying power and those kids believing.”

Says George, the athletic director: “They stuck it out and they stayed together. That’s why we’re so solid from a leadership standpoint. Those guys have persevered through adversity and some real difficult days and games and seasons. They stuck together. Now we’re seeing the benefit of that.”

The most difficult season might have been 2015. When MacIntyre arrived from San Jose State, several fans told him: “Coach, just be respectable. Get us back to where we can stay through halftime.” By last season, they had accomplished that goal. But it was especially frustrating when several second-half leads slipped away.

“Last year was just the breaking point of everything,” says Phillip Lindsay, a fourth-year junior who’s another member of MacIntyre’s first recruiting class. “You knew we could do it but we just weren’t winning the games. We found ways to lose.”

That discouragement is in part why the Buffs’ slogan this season — MacIntyre calls it their “battle cry” — is “Welcome To The Fight.” It grew from those close and discouraging losses in 2015, but also from the deaths of MacIntyre’s mother-in-law a year ago and his father last January, as well as the death of defensive lineman Jordan Carrell’s father.

“We just kept putting one foot in front of the other,” says MacIntyre of those trying times, adding that at some point, he realized: “Wow, life really is a fight every day. You can choose to fight it or give in. You can either choose to let the adversity destroy you, or you can look it in the face and let it grow you. … It’s the same way with our team.

“What we’re going through is our fight. We can win the fight. We could have made every excuse in the book as to why we could maybe not make it here, and we didn’t. So let’s go.”

MacIntyre says he saw last spring and summer that the Buffs finally had the combination of talent and maturity to compete with their peers. It’s why before the season, he proclaimed the goal was to become Pac-12 champions “on and off the field” (the latter portion a nod to his desire to develop boys into men, hoping for results far beyond and after football). In previous years, MacIntyre hadn’t challenged the Buffaloes to win the conference.

“I’m not gonna go out and just make some pipe dream up, but I thought this team was good enough to compete for it,” he says. “This team I knew had the vision and had the ability to do that, but I had to set the expectations high or quite frankly we might not have reached a bowl.

“And now we’re gonna reach more than anyone thought we could reach.”

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Which victory has been the most significant depends on whom you ask. Hagan says he felt a different vibe after a 44-7 win against Colorado State in the season opener, when players saw what coaches had been telling them in preseason practices come to fruition. MacIntyre says it was Oct. 15, a 40-16 pasting of Arizona State — a reversal of blowouts the previous year. Or maybe it was last time out, a 10-5 victory at Stanford (after which MacIntyre bought In-N-Out burgers for the entire team).

Others suggest playing well at Michigan, even in a loss, provided a significant confidence boost. But there’s a T-shirt selling in the team store that suggests a win Sept. 24 at Oregon was fairly significant ("Sweet Victory," it reads, along with the 41-38 final score). An emotional MacIntyre teared up on the field. But in the visitors’ locker room afterward, when a couple of players told him, “Coach, we’re going to a bowl now!” — well, the coach wasn’t having it.

The Buffs were 3-1, so there was still plenty of work to be done to achieve bowl-eligibility — but that wasn’t why.

“I grabbed them by the jersey,” he says, “and said, ‘No, we’re not going to a bowl — we’re gonna win a Pac-12 championship!’ ”

Three victories later, they achieved that bowl goal. And now they’re focused on much more — starting with enjoying the ride.

“These young men have made CU good again,” MacIntyre says, which is why he keeps preaching this message in those post-practice huddles: “These next four weeks here, one game at a time, you can make CU great again.”

“These next games, starting with UCLA,” he adds, “it’s gonna be more exhilarating than all the others (you’ve played). So enjoy the whole ride.”

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