After a devastating early loss, Notre Dame is in the CFP title game thanks to its “men in the arena.”

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Riley Leonard expected the worst.

When he entered coach Marcus Freeman’s second-floor office for a sit-down Sunday, about 24 hours after a stunning home loss to Northern Illinois, Leonard braced himself for bad news. After all, he made two costly interceptions in a game that seemed to dash all of Notre Dame’s hopes of making the College Football Playoff.

Is he going to tell me I’ll never touch the field again?

Was that my last game at Notre Dame?

What happened next was a bit strange, completely unexpected, and for Leonard, one of the most resonant things he had ever witnessed. A smiling Freeman hugged his quarterback, asked about his family and spoke pleasantries like the day before had never happened.

During their conversation, the coach made something obvious to the quarterback.

“In those final moments, Riley Leonard had to know that I thought he was our quarterback,” Freeman recalled to Yahoo Sports from his office. “People might say you’re terrible and boo you. As a head coach, I believe in you. And I need him to believe in me when we’re in the worst moments. The worst moments are when you find out who you really are.”

Riley left the meeting not feeling well, he says now — a turning point in the relationship between coach and quarterback, and perhaps the catapult he needed to recover from the first dual-game of his college career.

Four months later, the Irish hadn’t lost again. They have won 13 straight games, including three College Football Playoff games, and nine of the wins during the streak have been at least two. Despite the high-octane offense, Leonard threw for over 2,600 yards and 19 TDs. He’s second only to Jeremiyah Love in rushing yards with 866 and Love has just one more rushing touchdowns than a quarterback (17 to 16).

He plays more freely than ever before. Why? That 16-14 loss to the Huskies.

“I really hit rock bottom,” Riley told Yahoo Sports in November. “Who cares from this point on? I have a no-regrets mentality. Let it fly. Have fun. You only get one shot at this thing. It’s my senior year.”

The winning streak has catapulted the Notre Dame Irish (14-1) from an impossible playoff entrant to an improbable playoff entrant to a playoff team to a title game entrant.

Luck favored the Irish: The year they lost to Northern Illinois, there was an expanded 12-team playoff, which provided them enough room to get onto the field easily. Not only that, but unlike other teams, Notre Dame entered the playoffs without having played a physical, emotional game against a top-tier opponent in the conference championship.

After finishing the regular season by winning 10 straight games, the selection committee placed them in seventh place, giving them a home playoff berth. Since the Irish couldn’t win a conference championship as an independent, they weren’t eligible for a top-four seed and the bye that comes with that. But a home playoff game in South Bend — the first home playoff game in College Football Playoff history — was good for them.

The Irish stifled the No. 10 Indiana Hoosiers in front of a rave crowd at Notre Dame Stadium, illustrating how special a campus atmosphere can be in a postseason game. Love got things started with a 98-yard run to the end zone to set a College Football Playoff record early in the first quarter and the Irish never looked back. Leonard added 201 yards and a TD through the air to go along with 30 yards and a TD on the ground. They led 27-3 with just two minutes left before two garbage-time TDs made it 27-17.

They followed that up with a solid display of strength in the second round against Georgia, using a 17-point surge at the end of the first half and the start of the second half to put the Bulldogs away, 23-10. Leonard threw for 90 yards and added another 80 — not a stat line that will impress many, but he made plays and moved the sticks in big moments. The win showed that the Irish still belonged in the upper echelon of college football after a 31-year drought of futility in the major bowls.

Then, against Penn State in the semifinals in the Orange Bowl, it took a complete team effort to get past the Nittany Lions for a 27-24 win. Leonard played with his legs and his arm, Freeman called it a near-perfect game, and the Irish executed it perfectly, winning it in the final seconds on a 41-yard field goal by slugger Mitch Jeter.

“Everyone on this program knows we control our own destiny,” Freeman said in November.

Now there’s one game left — against Ohio State in the national championship in Atlanta. Winning an SEC state title would be very special for Leonard, a kid who grew up along the Alabama coast without receiving offers from those regional schools. He eventually signed with Duke, won 16 games as a starter for two years, then transferred here during the offseason.

It’s a long way from home and far from the Gulf Coast fishing holes he frequented as a child. He’s a Southern boy living in the Midwest who holds one of the most high-pressure positions in the sport: starting quarterback at Notre Dame.

Things were going well in this round until the Irish lost by 28 points.

Being Notre Dame’s quarterback isn’t fun anymore.

“You don’t understand the magnitude of (the situation) until things get bad,” he said.

Fortunately, his girlfriend and marketing team run his social media platforms. He did not see any malice or hatred. Instead, his friends and family saw it all and texted him about it.

Don’t look at your comments!

They are all crazy!

They say brutal things – don’t listen!

Don’t worry, Leonard will respond, he’s not listening or watching.

After all, critics are merely “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” This is a line from former President Teddy Roosevelt’s speech on courage that he gave in Paris in 1910 called “The Man in the Square.”

It’s one of Riley’s favorites. In fact, he has the speech text as the lock screen wallpaper on his smartphone.

It is not the critic that is important; Not the man who points out how the strong stumble or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. Credit goes to the man who is already on the scene.

Leonard views himself as that guy in the arena, with the bright lights shining on his gold helmet.

Freeman isn’t all that different. He’s on the scene, too, the face of Notre Dame football, one of the richest and most historic programs in the country, which has been without a national championship in 36 years.

Their positions — head coach at Notre Dame, starting at quarterback at Notre Dame — are two of the most enviable and inescapable positions in the sport. Conquer, and adulation will be showered upon you; Loss and you are the reason.

“This is the situation we are in,” Freeman said.

“The lowest moments are when you discover who you really are and what you are made of,” he later said. “If you have a lot of bad moments, guess what? You’re gone. You don’t care if you’re the quarterback or the head coach. You’ve got to be replaced.”

If they win the final, if they win it all, they might point to that bad moment as the reason.

It is the pain that drives the Irish.

“We use him as motivation every day,” linebacker Jack Kiser said. “I can’t lose this pain. I can’t lose what this feeling means.”

Save the pain. It’s a slogan Freeman started using after the loss to the Huskies.

The gist: Don’t forget how you felt when you lost. Fear of loss. Fear of loss.

“People are usually motivated by two things: fear or greed,” Freeman said. “I keep reminding them: You have to keep the pain in. There has to be fear.”

This isn’t the first time Freeman has revived a team that suffered a tough loss at the start of the season. In his first season in 2022, Marshall beat Notre Dame in South Bend. His team followed this up by winning eight of the next nine.

In fact, that game came up during a Sunday conversation in September between the quarterback and the coach. Freeman looked at Leonard and said, “I’ve been in your shoes.” “I’ve been here before.”

He told Leonard that Freeman has grown a lot from that loss to Marshall. He learned how to be a better coach and a better leader.

After the Northern Illinois defeat, the coach spent time examining how it could happen again.

Marshall and now Northern Illinois? how? Why?

It’s all mental, he says. A week before the Northern Illinois game, the Irish opened the season with an emotional victory at Texas A&M, earning a win in a hostile, humid Texas environment. “We were not prepared to deal with success,” he said.

Now, more than four months and 13 wins later, the Irish are one win away from a title — with a quarterback and coach more relevant than ever as men on the scene.

“He had to go through the ups and downs of being a Notre Dame quarterback to understand what that entails,” Freeman said. “Just like me as a head coach. Anyone can tell you what it’s like to be a head coach at Notre Dame, but until you experience it, you don’t know.”

(Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on November 14 and has been updated to reflect Notre Dame reaching the College Football Playoff title game.)