How would an Alabama loss impact the legacy of this decade of dominance?

Close your SEC-colored eyes and imagine it’s around 11:45 on Monday night, the confetti is falling onto the field at Raymond James Stadium and Clemson has dethroned mighty Alabama to win its first national championship since 1981.

Dabo Swinney (below) has gotten his ring after the excruciating near-miss of a year ago. Deshaun Watson has his headline-grabbing hardware after watching Bama celebrate last January and seeing Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson walk away with the Heismans he couldn’t quite get his hands on.

College football’s king of the hill resides at Howard’s Rock.

And Nick Saban’s perfect little dynasty finally has a championship-game loss stapled to it, after all those victories on the very grandest of stages. Imagine Saban having trouble wearing a smile but this time it’s actually after a loss, and the legions of proper, well-dressed Crimson Tide faithful slowly stream out of the stadium in shock, looking back at the big scoreboard on their way out just to make sure the impossible was all very real.

Weird to imagine, isn’t it? When something has seemed so automatic for such a long period of time and it goes the other way, well, you’re entitled to think you are on another planet.

It would be hard to fathom, wouldn’t it? The Tide of Saban coming to the climactic end to a college football season and crashing.

Yes, it almost happened last year. But it didn’t, and wasn’t that just the latest proof that this Alabama team could be pushed to the limit in a national championship game and still come out the victor? It was as though the Tide outlasting the Tigers in that classic in the desert last January enriched the dynasty because it was such a tenuous proposition.

It wasn’t the comfortable, 16-point victory over Texas in the 2009 title game that launched this ridiculous run of success. It wasn’t the 21-0 methodical smothering of LSU in 2011. And it certainly wasn’t the 28-point whitewash of Notre Dame in 2012 that gave Bama three championships in four years.

It was Bama breathlessly beating Clemson to the finish line, when defeat was imminent for most of the night.

But now here comes Clemson again, just as talented, just as versatile and even more battle-tested.

And 100 times more hungry. And 1,000 times more determined to hand Saban that first loss in a title game during this run of dominance.

Throw in an Alabama offense that wasn’t exactly impressive, to be kind, in the semifinal against Washington, and the on-the-fly transition from Lane Kiffin to Steve Sarkisian the week of the title clash, and a Clemson victory on Monday night is hardly far-fetched.

Open your eyes now. What if it really does happen?

Would Bama’s legacy be tainted somehow? Would Saban be any less of a college coaching legend? Would his statue that was unveiled nearly six years ago, after the first of these national titles, reflect a little less perfectly off those Tuscaloosa sunrises?

Only if you believe somehow that winning the whole thing every year is what makes a dynasty a dynasty, and that’s plainly absurd and uneducated. Yes, the Tide has never wilted in a title game, not yet at least, but 50 years from now, when the college football historians and the next Paul Finebaum look back on all this, they can ask: So what happened in 2010? Or 2013? And 2014?

The answer, of course, is that Alabama was merely very good in 2010. And merely very, very good in 2013. And merely great but not championship great when it fell to that on-a-mission Ohio State team in the 2014 playoff semifinals, two wins short of yet another crown.

So, this Alabama run already has a few glitches, even if none of them are in the ultimate game — yet.

The Michael Jordan-Scottie Pippen Chicago Bulls went 6-0 in Finals in the 1990s. But they came up short twice in the middle of their two three-peats and, yes, Jordan was retired during the 1994 playoffs, but he had returned (albeit not in the best of shape) for the 1995 playoff run and Chicago didn’t win it all that year either. And how about those springtime disappointments in 1989 and ’90 at the hands of the Pistons, with basically the same team that won those first three titles from 1991-93?

So, even the most pristine of championship dynasties has dents, chinks, years when it didn’t quite work out in the end, years when they were really, really, really good but not quite good enough. And what made those teams truly special is their ability to dust themselves off the next year, come back and win it all once more. Or twice more even.

Look at the 1980s Showtime Lakers. They dashed through the decade, winning five championships. But what about the other five years? What happened in 1981, and ’83, and ’84, and ’86, and ’89? Well, easy. The Celtics of Bird, the 76ers of Dr. J and Moses, the Celtics again, those Celtics yet again, and the young-and-brash Pistons — that’s what and who.

The 1980s Edmonton Oilers had to fight through the champion Islanders early in the decade, then captured five Stanley Cups in seven years, a run that would be almost the same as Alabama’s if the Tide can stiff-arm that first championship-game loss once again on Monday night. But the Oilers didn’t win it all in ’86, and their hated rivals from Calgary won it all in ’89 — before Edmonton came back and won one more crown in ’90 to finish its run of Cups.

Same drill with the 1980s 49ers because, yes, that decade boasted amazing dynasties that won a lot but lost a little, too. Of the Niners’ four Super Bowls in the 80s, one came early in the decade, one came midway through, and then San Francisco put on the exclamation point (two in this case) with titles in 1988 and ’89, perfectly ending its decade of dominance with maybe its best team of all.

The 49ers ran up against some of the best teams of all-time when they didn’t win, like the ’85 Bears, who were arguably the best single-season team ever, the ’86 Giants, the ’82 and ’87 Redskins and the ’83 Raiders. The Niners had a whopping three years in between titles two and three. Bama’s longest period in between titles so far is two years, when Jameis Winston was just too tough in 2013 and Ohio State was simply too determined in 2014, and the Tide has already shown the ability all of those dynasties did of coming up short and then coming back stronger to win it again, as it did last year.

And so what about this year? What about Monday night in Tampa? Close those eyes again. It will either be five titles in eight years, or merely four in eight. If it’s the latter, Saban will be exactly three wins short of six crowns in eight years.

And if the Tide does finally succumb on the biggest stage, with a freshman quarterback mind you against one dripping with big-game experience, it will only mean Bama is a little more human than we thought four hours earlier.

It could very well happen, too. So prepare for it.

And if Clemson does do the deed and takes Bama down, just remember the recruiting class coming to Tuscaloosa, that Jalen Hurts will return ultra-motivated to finish the job in 2017, that Sarkisian will have all offseason to plan and diagram, and that guy whose statue was unveiled after his first title at Bama will be back to make sure 2016 was one of those blip years — and that more January Monday nights are in the Tide’s near future.

Cory Nightingale

Cory Nightingale, a sports copy editor at the Miami Herald, lives for Saturdays. He especially enjoys the pageantry, tradition and history of SEC football.