Spoiler what?

 So maybe it's time to retire the word, as Boiler Up floods the Ross-Ade Stadium turf again like water from a burst main. Spoilermakers? Really?

Not anymore, perhaps. Maybe it's time to acknowledge the Purdue Boilermakers are just a pretty damn good football team when they've got their minds right, unranked though they may be.

Because here it is November again, when night comes down hard and fast in the late afternoon/early evening, and here again is the Sea O' Humanity, making the field disappear in Ross-Ade. And here again are numbers on a scoreboard sending shock waves through college football.

Purdue 40, No. 3 Michigan State 29.

Second time in a month the Purdues have knocked off a top-five team while unranked -- something they've now done 17 times in school history, more than any other college football team in the land.

They're 6-3 now and tied for first in the Big Ten West, and they're doing it with defense and a bionic-armed quarterback -- where have we heard that one before, in West Lafayette? -- and a crazy-good wide receiver. They're also doing it with a head coach who's occasionally a bit crazy himself, seeing as how he likes every to draw up a play in the dirt every so often just to see what happens.

Saturday afternoon, Jeff Brohm drew up some sort of baroque reverse/flea flicker/screen pass he said he stole from some high school somewhere. Jackson Anthrop took it 39 yards to the house, because of course he did.

The bionic-armed quarterback, Aidan O'Connell, meanwhile threw the football 54 times, completing an absurd 40 of them, for 536 yards and three touchdowns. The crazy-good receiver, David Bell, caught 11 of them for an equally absurd 217 yards and two scores.

And, sure, you can say the Boilers caught Michigan State in a trap game, considering the Spartans were coming off a giddy come-from-behind victory over Michigan, their most bitter rival. And you can say the win at then-No. 2 Iowa has paled a bit since, considering the Hawkeyes have gone on to lose big to Wisconsin and barely scrape past sadsack Northwestern, 17-12.

And, yes, there was that limp effort against the Badgers the week after the Iowa win, a 30-13 loss that might simply have been Purdue doing Purdue things -- i.e., ascending to the heights, and then inexplicably stepping in it, as if the view made them dizzy. And so the jury seems destined to be forever out on the Boilers.

But at some point, when do the Spoilers just become the Boilers? When do we acknowledge that, in some respects, they're having the season Indiana had last year, with everything breaking their way and the Boilermakers good enough to cash in on it?

I'd say now would be a good time.