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Should it be:

"Against All Odds"?

"Hocus Pocus"?

"Stardust"?

"Rags to Riches"?

Or maybe, "Enchanted"?

All fit. Who woulda thunk it? (Not the Las Vegas oddsmakers).

A few seconds after Brent Brennan was doused with a chilly Powerade bath Friday night in Tempe, a forceful 23-7 victory over ASU, he said "Nobody thought we could — but check us out now."

At a school whose historic football narrative has been "What Might Have Been," the ’25 Wildcats turned a dark scenario into a bolt of positive energy that could light up Casino Del Sol Stadium (and maybe fill all of the seats at the 2026 season opener).

A year ago in Tucson, ASU beat Arizona 49-7. It gained 643 yards, or 433 more than Arizona. The separation between the Sun Devils and Wildcats seemed large enough that one of those "Pity the Kitty" billboards seemed sure to live forever on Interstate 10 between Tucson and Tempe.

On Friday, ASU gained 214 yards, a mile below its average of 417.

"We set this thing on fire the second half of the season," said Brennan, who is no longer on an ill-conceived hot seat, but rather should be named the Big 12 Coach of the Year this week.

Good things happen to college teams that catapult to 9-3 from the football cellar in one brief year, and one of those things is that Arizona could, for the first time in history (dating to 1950) have a first-team All-Conference quarterback.

Noah Fifita was 28 for 45 for 286 yards with no interceptions against ASU, and it cements his statistics as good or better than his two closest pursuers for the Big 12's first-team QB. His numbers are very comparable to Baylor's Sawyer Robertson and TCU's Josh Hoover, but neither Robertson nor Hoover changed their school's football history the way Fifita has. Neither Hoover nor Robertson staged any kind of rally to finish close to 9-3. Powerhouse Texas Tech QB Behren Morton seems out of the conversation because he missed three games to injury.

This is important, very important, to UA football. From the day it joined the WAC in 1963, it has NEVER produced the first-team all-league quarterback.

Bruce Hill was second-team in 1975, as was Tom Tunnicliffe in 1983, as was Keith Smith in 1998, Willie Tuitama in 2008 and Matt Scott in 2012. It seems deserving that Fifita receives a first-team honor after taking an offense that averaged 21 points a year ago to 33 this season. That's like a big-league outfielder improving his batting average from .210 to .330 in a season.

One bonus from winning Friday's Territorial Cup was to raise the school's status from a low-key bowl game to one that counts. Had the Wildcats lost Friday, they almost surely would have been sentenced to the Dec. 13 LA Bowl Hosted By Gronk before what surely would've been an embarrassing, mostly-empty SoFi Stadium in a late-night kickoff. That's two weeks before the long-certified bowl games begin.

Now the UA has elevated itself to something like the Sun Bowl, a CBS production, on New Year's Eve afternoon. It's a five-hour drive to El Paso. There might be 15,000 Wildcat fans in UTEP's stadium.

The team whose home games this season were plagued by excessive sun, excessive rain and maddening lightning delays, is overdue to be rewarded with well-deserved sunshine.