What you see ...

 ... is not always what you get. I suppose we should know this by now when Labor Day weekend rolls around and you sit in some sports bar and 9,000 TVs are tuned to 9,000 college football games, most of them cupcake feedings.

Purdue laminating Indiana State over here. Pitt boat-racing Kent State over there. Maryland dog-piling UConn and Ole Miss tenderizing Furman and Alabama, Tennessee, Auburn, Indiana and a bunch of others chowing down on your basic Directional Hyphen kibble.

I don't know what we learned from all that, frankly. I don't even know if Notre Dame is a legit No. 7 team in the country, or is carrying a fake ID the way Notre Dame has so often done in the recent past.

What I do know is this, after ND 23, Texas A&M 13 down in College Station last night: If you want that No. 7 ranking, you're gonna have to fistfight the Irish for it.

What I know is they marched into Kyle Field with Reveille the dog and all of that 12th Man business, and they, well, took care of business. Went barbed-wire-defense-to-barbed-wire-defense with the Aggies all night long. Fell behind, tied it; fell behind again, tied it; took the lead ... lost the lead ... put it away, finally, when the clock got skinny and putting it away in a place like Kyle Field is the hardest.

Tied at 13 with six minutes to play and everything screaming "overtime", the Irish marched 85 yards in eight plays, all but two of them on the ground, then got the six when Jeremiyah Love burst through a seam on the left side and was in the end zone a blink of the eye later. 

That made it 20-13 with less than two minutes to play, and the Irish added a field goal at the end after ruthlessly shutting down A&M's next possession. 

So, 10 points in the last 1:49, on a night when points came dear in as hostile an environment as exists in the college game. That says something, I suppose. It says that even if  the Irish aren't one of those Georgia/Alabama/Ohio State juggernauts yet, they're at least something else.

They're ... gritty. 

Gritty, last night, was winning a game in which they slopped around a lot (11 penalties for 99 yards) and got punished at times by a punishing Aggies "D", until it came time not to slop around and get punished. Gritty was a defense that attacked and attacked and attacked, anchored by a secondary that gave A&M and quarterback Connor Wiegman barely a sniff. Stole two of Wiegman's throws, broke up some others, forced him into a 12-of-30 passing night.

Gritty was Marcus Freeman saying "Screw it" and going for it twice on fourth-and-short on his side of the field. And it was quarterback Riley Leonard, who kept going down and bouncing up and making plays, throwing for 158 yards while running for 63 more on 11 carries notable primarily for their bullheadedness.

He's never going to be a Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels, or even a Terry Hanratty or Joe Montana. But he won't have to be if he can keep handing the ball to Love and Jadarian Price, who spearheaded a running game that averaged nearly six yards per carry and ground-pounded A&M for 198 yards on 34 attempts.

Thirty-four running plays; 30 passes. Pretty Holtz-ian stuff, that.

All of which is to say these Irish are going to be a lot more blue-jeans-and-tees than tuxedos most of the time, and that sometime this fall someone likely will beat them. Maybe a couple of someones. This despite the fact the yappers in the ABC booth were already pumping the usual helium into the Notre Dame balloon last night, looking at the schedule and declaring that, by golly, the Irish could run the table and be right there in the mix for the national title.

Way too early for that sort of wild talk. It is, remember, Labor Day weekend.

When we Labor to decipher Big Deal U. vs. Whatsamatta U. When What It All Means must wait for another weekend, another game, another Saturday in the sun.