ATHENS, Ga. — From the moment you hit South Milledge Avenue Monday afternoon, it was evident Athens spent most of the first full weekend of 2023 preparing for a party.

Homes dotting the historic street flew Georgia flags or signs and lawns were filled with inflated Bulldogs and hand-painted homages to the school’s cherished football cheers, from “Hunker Down!” to “Sic ’em, Junkyard Dawgs.” By 3 pm, swarms of students and families alike lined College Avenue, perusing Georgia’s downtown shops and enjoying a midafternoon meal. Other folks stopped and shopped at The Red Zone on Clayton Street, purchasing pullovers to battle the January cold or snagging on-sale merchandise from Georgia’s 42-41 New Year’s Eve Peach Bowl win over Ohio State. As midafternoon turned to late afternoon, crowds swelled and Athens’ finest dutifully began redirecting traffic and putting up barricades at College Avenue and East Clayton Street. Local bars began to open their doors. Music boomed from shops and outdoor speakers.

Athens, the oldest and most charming of the south’s many treasured college towns, was steadying itself for a community celebration. There would be no star-crossed, sullen, 14,984-day wait this time around. Just 364 days after the last great Georgia party, revelry would again rule the night at the University of Georgia.

Not even the town’s historic Victorian architecture was immune. As Georgia stormed to a 38-7 halftime lead against overwhelmed TCU, columns on buildings were draped with Bulldogs’ flags or covered with hanging strings of red and black confetti paper. Fireworks that periodically illuminated the sky revealed matching Georgia helmets adorning the lamps on the University of Georgia arch.

Strolling the streets and then, at least initially, settling in at Blue Sky Bar, I soaked in the scene. As a University of Florida alum who grew up in Atlanta, I’ve always felt a bit like an outcast in Athens, a place Georgians who leave the state for college rarely go and Gators find themselves even less often. But any self-respecting southerner admires Athens, the vibrant little community at the crossroads of rustic Georgia and the road to Atlanta, and any self-respecting college football fan or writer respects what Kirby Smart has so meticulously built at his alma mater. To be there on a night when Georgia ushered in the latest of the SEC’s football dynasties was special, and that was the sense I got on a sun-splashed Athens afternoon even before toe met leather in Los Angeles and Kirby’s imperious Georgia “went hunting” for dinner.

Michelle Boatwright, a second-year Georgia masters student, was the first to sit on the rooftop after me, nursing a Goslings Dark and Stormy. Sitting with her housemate, Victoria Woods, a local schoolteacher and Georgia alumna, Boatwright lamented not making the journey to LA.

“I should be out there, really,” Michelle told me two hours before kickoff, kindly mentioning her affection for Saturday Down South in the process. “I’ve been to 8 games this season while crafting a masters thesis, and making it 9 would have been special. But I experienced the Athens party a year ago, and we’re in for a treat if things go the way I think they’ll go.”

As the bar slowly filled up and a projector screen was quickly assembled outside, Boatwright reflected on a lifetime of cheering on the Dawgs with her dad, a farmer in Ashburn, Georgia.

“When I went to get an undergraduate degree at (Georiga) Southern, I think I almost broke his heart,” Boatwright said. “He has 3 daughters, and I was the one who loved football. As a little girl, I cried when David Greene and the Dawgs lost to the Gators in 2002. I danced circles with my dad in our living room when we sacked Tua on 1st-and-10 in overtime in (January) 2018. We fell to the floor and I burst into tears a play later. To win last year, and to be here again this year, there’s enough of us who will never take any of this for granted.”

It’s people like Michelle and her dad who make college football special, I think, as the sun slowly fades and the streets become a mob scene of controlled chaos, with fans filing into watering holes and restaurants or trudging toward Stegeman Coliseum for a university-sponsored watch party.

At Cutter’s, I meet Jason Tyler, a senior journalism student from Atlanta. He asks what a “Florida homer writer” like me is doing in Athens, and I offer to buy him a cold beer. He agrees and after a lengthy wait on an overwhelmed bartender, we are served just as Adonai Mitchell outwrestles a TCU defender on a 22-yard strike from Stetson Bennett to put the Dawgs up a staggering 31 points just before halftime.

“What a catch!” I yell, not knowing it will set off a Stetson Bennett appreciation soliloquy from Jason, which sends me frantically searching for my sound recording device. I tap record three sentences in and Tyler, like a Todd Monken offense, is humming.

“Week after week, you know? Stetson can’t do this and Stetson can’t do that and the local beat writer could win a natty playing quarterback at Georgia with that defense. It’s utter nonsense. Look, you’re an SEC guy. We’ve had some of the best quarterbacks ever to play the sport in this league. Think about the last 10 years alone: Cam (OK, close enough, I think), Joe Burrow, Tua, Kyle Trask, Fromm (I’ll allow it, he’s rolling) … and you don’t ever hear Stetson in that group. Well, 2 national championships. Doesn’t that speak for itself?”

Tyler isn’t wrong, and I’m as guilty as the next man in writing Bennett off as a product of a program that has assembled such elite talent at every position that even competence at the sport’s most important position (see, how I would describe Jake Fromm — competent) is enough to help you compete for a national title.

Bennett, however, is far more than competent. He’s a legitimately great college quarterback in a way that Buck Belue never was and David Greene, DJ Shockley and Aaron Murray weren’t quite either. Bennett’s 304 yards and 6 total touchdowns against TCU, coming on the heels of an epic fourth quarter comeback that made Monday night possible, aren’t a product of anything but Bennett’s own excellence. That his excellence is a creature of Bennett’s commitment to preparation, film study and his innate understanding of Monken’s offense more than it is about a rocket arm or NFL intangibles doesn’t diminish the greatness of Bennett. On the contrary, it expands it.

As the fourth quarter begins, I cruise out to College Avenue, where the controlled chaos of the first half has become an exercise of ecstasy and excess. Fireworks explode around me and coeds take video as friends climb light poles and make barking noises. As Branson Robinson plunges into the end zone to make it 59-7, the scale of the party is nearly outsized by the scale of Georgia’s astonishing dominance.

Is this the greatest college football team ever, I ask Teddy Wilkes, a law student from Orlando, whose story is interesting in no small part because he arrived in Athens two years ago after spending his undergraduate in Tuscaloosa, monitoring the late years of the Saban dynasty.

“I don’t think they’d beat 2019 LSU, if that’s what you are asking,” Teddy says. “Does it even matter? Why do we have to put a label on the extent of this team’s excellence?” he asks, and he has a point, I think.

What we know is we’ve never — not even with 1995 Nebraska’s obliteration of a great Florida team in the Fiesta Bowl — seen national championship game dominance the likes of which Georgia displayed on Monday night in Los Angeles. Sure, 1995 Florida was the second-best team, a 12-0 juggernaut with an all-time great college quarterback and a genius head coach. TCU was, well, TCU, not the second-best team or even the fifth-best team, probably, but certainly deserving of a College Football Playoff berth and absolutely a very good team. And that’s the thing: Georgia pummeled the team put in front of them.

Before Georgia scored again, Wilkes’ girlfriend, Melissa Sullivan, a UGA nursing student, rightly suggests that is what matters.

“You can only beat who you have to play. It isn’t Georgia’s fault Michigan choked in the semifinal. It isn’t Georgia’s fault that Alabama lost 2 games and didn’t deserve to get in the Playoff this year. What Georgia did was control the controllables, right? It’s 59-7. That’s controlling what you can control. That’s historic.”

It is historic, and as Monday night slips toward Tuesday morning, it’s time for me to find my way to the serenity of a warm bed and away from a back-to-back championship scene I’ll remember forever. On the walk back, I see four students taking a selfie and offer to take a picture of the entire group. Grateful, Ashley Davis, a Georgia junior and economics major from Marietta, provides a final thought that should sit uncomfortably with the rest of the college football universe pondering the longest offseason in major sports.

“It’s just getting started,” Davis tells me. “Kirby isn’t even 50. He’s younger than my dad. Carson Beck is like … a 5-star version of Stetson, OK? (Beck is a 4-star, but at nearly 12:30 in the morning, fine-tuning the facts is for the birds). How many of these guys are back? Brock? Back. Most this defense? Back. Who is going to stop us? Who’s that coming down the track!!” Davis suddenly yells, finishing her thought with a smile.

“A mean machine in red and black,” her friends shout back.

A mean machine indeed. A championship machine. A dynasty in the making. The second consecutive, but not the last, of Georgia celebrations to come.