Zach Calzada grew up on Saturday, and so did the Texas A&M Aggies.

Calzada rose into a true leadership role against the No. 1 team in the nation. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to get the best out of an athlete. Sometimes it takes a half a season to fully develop confidence. Whatever it was — perhaps a little of both — it was something the Aggies had sorely missed over the first 5 games of 2021.

Calzada threw for a career-high 285 yards. His 3 touchdown passes tied a career high. He also tossed 3 TDs earlier this season against New Mexico. His 21 completions (21-for-31) were also the sophomore’s career best.

But after losing a 24-10 lead and then not only bringing the Aggies back for a game-tying touchdown, but gutting out an injury on the play — not missing one snap — to come back and lead the team to the game-winning field goal showed a certain degree of intestinal fortitude. He willed the Aggies to the 41-32 victory.

Jimbo Fisher kept telling us to believe in the process. But consecutive losses to Arkansas and Mississippi State made that theory very difficult to get on board with. Fortunately, those within the program had a much closer and better view of the bigger picture.

Fisher becomes the first former assistant under Alabama head coach Nick Saban to beat him, snapping a streak of futility that spanned 24 games. Fisher was the offensive coordinator under Saban at LSU. The 2 were part of the Tigers’ staff that won the 2003 national championship.

Before the 2021 season started, most would not have considered Saturday’s result that big of an upset. The Aggies were supposed to give teams like Alabama fits. They were supposed to be in the conversation of the best teams in college football. What none of us could have known is that it would take them half the season to reach that point.

Does this mean the Aggies will win every game the rest of the season? That’s what expectations will be. But we’ve been on that roller-coaster ride all season.

So we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s hard to imagine that the Aggies could play with this same kind of intensity for 6 more games, but that’s what winning programs do. That’s what programs like Alabama do week in and week out.

Alabama didn’t lose on Saturday because of a lack of intensity. It lost on Saturday because Texas A&M was the better-coached team that day. It lost on Saturday because it met a team that matched its intensity.

So we’ll see over the next few weeks if the Aggies have taken that next step to be the elite program most expected when the season started, or if Saturday’s game was simply a matter of Fisher and his coordinators — Mike Elko on defense and Darrell Dickey on offense — coming up with the mother of all game plans.

It was a game plan that the personnel within the Aggies team could execute — and it did so with the utmost of precision, for the most part. It certainly seemed like this was at the very least a major part of the victory. Alabama had all kinds of trouble blocking the schemes that Elko threw at it, and Dickey devised a near-perfect game plan that utilized to the fullest an offensive line that hadn’t shown much consistency at all in the first half of the season.

It was all those factors that led to the biggest win in the Fisher era at Texas A&M. Now we get to sit back and watch the second half of the 2021 season to see where it all leads the program from here.