The present and recent past is spoken for. A question for the ages is, was it always this way? Were we deceiving ourselves about the relative quality of Utah and BYU teams of the past? That 2008 Ute team that went unbeaten in the MWC and rolled past Alabama in the Sugar Bowl  would it have won the Pac-10? Would it have gone on the road to beat USC and Oregon and Stanford, not just in the singular but in the collective, totaled up week after week after week? How would the 2004 team have done in the SEC? How would BYU's national championship team have fared in a major conference?