ANGOLA – He sees something you don’t out there, beyond all this gorgeous new brick and steel.

The beginning. That’s what Matt Land sees.

He leans on the granite tabletop in the bigwigs’ suite, and he looks out the windows at the lights and the FieldTurf and all the immaculate things that are Trine University football now, and he sees … Johnstown, post-dam. Or the world, post-Noah.

“I can remember a practice field that was flooded, and we’d have 30 yards to practice on,” he says. “Now we have two grass practice fields that are elevated four feet, so we never have to cancel a practice. And we have an indoor practice facility, turf, lights, and this new building with a weight room, a locker room, coaches’ offices, meeting rooms …

“It’s light years different.”

Light years beyond light years, truth be told. Here in Fred Zollner Athletic Stadium, behind the brick facades with the big blue T’s and the wrought-iron gates with their smaller black T’s, there are suites with leather chairs and fireplaces and beds that fold up into the walls. There is a 3,000-or-so-square-foot weight room. There is a roughly 6,000-square-foot locker room, the aforementioned coaches’ offices, and Land’s own office, equipped with an immense flat-screen TV and two Trine-blue leather recliners the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

“So when did they get all this finished?” you ask.

“About five minutes before the players reported this fall,” Land replies.

And if that makes you think it all happened overnight up here, Land will quickly set you straight. He still sees that flooded practice field. He still remembers taking over a program that was coming off an 0-10 season. His players, the ones who’ve been here for a while, anyway, remember him coming to their homes and sitting down and trying to sell them on a Division III school in Angola that couldn’t win for losing.

“Coach Land promised us a conference championship,” senior defensive back Aaron Selking says. “It was kind of hard to grasp because they were 0-10 the year before. But then my freshman year we came in and we kind of bought into the program, and we just started working every day and every day. And it finally came to this, I guess.”

“This” being a football team worthy of its new digs. With Olivet coming in today, the Thunder is 7-0 and ranked sixth in the NCAA Division III North Region. It’s averaging 44.3 points while giving up just 8.6. Twenty-six seniors who’ve seen it all dot the roster.

Excellence is no longer a goal here. It’s the standard.

“The first time we went to the playoffs, we were just excited to be there,” Selking says. “And then the next year, we were excited to be there again, but … we weren’t satisfied with just making it to the playoffs, we wanted to go farther. And this year we want to go even farther.”

Adds Watt: “Other teams prepare like they have a shot to take us down now. We know we’re always going to get everybody’s best game.”

Somewhere, back of those words, a circle closes softly. Land sits in his office surrounded by all the immaculate things that are Trine football now, and he hears it. And then he smiles.

“We’ve put ourselves in a position, and our kids have worked hard to put ourselves in a position, to get everybody’s best game every week,” he says. “And you only get that if you’re on top.

“We’re getting what we tried to do to everybody else early on. So we’ve come full circle.”