Kirby Smart hasn’t had time to look back.

The Georgia coach says he doesn’t believe in rearview-mirror thinking, and that the only reason he looks back on a game is to find weaknesses that a future opponent could exploit.

So no, Smart hasn’t looked back at how mammoth that Notre Dame win was.

Unlike the rest of us, he hasn’t had time to appreciate the fact that his team was ranked No. 1 in the first College Football Playoff poll because of that win in South Bend. Smart hasn’t had the chance to break down how the Dawgs’ win back in September impacted the entire landscape of college football more than any other game in 2017.

At the time, Smart believed what everyone else did. It was a hard-fought battle between two up-and-coming teams. But nobody could’ve known that both teams were ready to join the national title conversation.

“I certainly thought they were a really good football team. I thought they were much-improved from the previous year just by the tape we had going in,” Smart said on Tuesday. “But we felt like we were, too. I felt like Brian (Kelly) thought that after the game.

“He told us, ‘That was two really good teams playing,’ and he was probably wiser than me to recognize that at the time.”

Credit: Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports

Picture if Smart and the rest of the college football world had a crystal ball back in Week 2. They would’ve been able to see where we’d be at heading into November. They would’ve seen that UCF had more wins than Florida and Florida State combined.

More importantly, they would’ve seen that Georgia and Notre Dame were ranked No. 1 and No. 3, respectively. They would’ve asked how that could be possible. Essentially the only scenario in which that would’ve made sense is if both teams destroyed their opponents and neither suffered another loss.

Yeah, about that.

Georgia has outscored its seven non-Notre Dame opponents by 209 points. Notre Dame outscored its seven non-Georgia opponents by 196 points.

Nobody could’ve known that both teams would be that dominant. At that point, the Dawgs and Irish were in the top 25 more because of preseason expectations and program prestige. It certainly wasn’t because of what they did in 2016. After all, Georgia was -9 vs. Power 5 opponents last year. Notre Dame was -30 against Power 5 opponents (and just 2-7 overall).

We had no idea the turnaround that was in store. If we did, we would’ve picked some other pregame storylines:

There were plenty of headlines about Jake Fromm getting his first career start. Georgia fans’ voyage up north was also well-documented.

That might’ve been the only thing that wouldn’t have changed had we known then what we know now. How could Notre Dame Stadium have held any MORE Georgia fans than the tens of thousands who invaded South Bend? There really couldn’t have been much more red than the amount we saw that day, but surely the secondary ticket market would’ve been even more lucrative.

The headlines would’ve been different, though. They would’ve been a little more, um, Playoff-driven.

“Alabama-Florida State? Georgia-Notre Dame is the real non-conference headliner of 2017”

“Playoff-hungry Georgia, Notre Dame set to battle in catastrophic showdown”

“Why every Playoff contender should be rooting hard for Georgia to knock off Notre Dame”

That was the reality of that game. A one-loss Notre Dame is currently threatening to steal Power 5 bids. Can you picture if the Irish entered November undefeated? The Irish then would have four wins vs. current top-25 teams, which would easily be the most of anyone in the field. Notre Dame would still have a loss to give with four games remaining.

That would be bad, bad news for the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12. Really bad news.

Thanks to Georgia, that never happened. But think about how close that was to happening. There were plenty of sequences in that game that could’ve gone the Irish’s way.

What if Sony Michel didn’t make that devastating juke on that third-and-1 on Georgia’s go-ahead drive? What if Javon Wims didn’t make that spectacular catch on a jump ball to put the Dawgs in field goal position with 5 minutes left? What if Rodrigo Blankenship couldn’t shake off his only miss of the season earlier that night and he shanked the game-winner?

Shoot, what if Terry Godwin didn’t make arguably the catch of the year in college football (it wasn’t initially ruled a catch)?

Lord knows how close Notre Dame was to pulling that game out. Instead, it was another moment to question Kelly. A week after the Irish finally got back into the Associated Press top 25 — something that many questioned — all of Kelly’s hot seat talk was back in full force. He didn’t help himself when he snapped at a reporter in the postgame press conference.

Maybe Kelly was so upset because he knew his team was inches from capitalizing on a monumental opportunity. Clearly, the Notre Dame coach was sick of answering more questions about close losses dating back to the Irish’s disastrous 2016 campaign.

Fortunately for Kelly, he hasn’t had to answer those questions since that night. Notre Dame’s narrowest margin of victory in its current six-game win streak was a 38-18 rout at Michigan State.

Georgia hasn’t been one play away from a loss, either. The Dawgs’ narrowest margin of victory since that game was 25 points.

Smart got to celebrate a statement win that night. Though “celebrating” for Smart was probably staying up until 3 a.m. watching Samford game film. By now, everybody knows that Smart has no time to look in his rearview mirror.

But one day, Smart will look back at just how big that night in South Bend was.