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COLUMBIA, Mo. — It’s harder than ever, in college sports, to pinpoint when a team’s season is over.

The national championship football game will be played on Jan. 20, 2025, wrapping up all campaigns at that point. But the transfer portal will have opened and closed long — by fast-paced sports standards — before that point.

Many power conference programs will play their final game of the season around the end of the calendar year, trekking to bowl games that aren’t what they used to be with rosters that aren’t what they were just a few weeks prior.

And the fiery orb that is the transfer portal already creeps toward the horizon, ready to dawn dramatically on Dec. 9.

Of course, whatever power the portal has to end a season can’t be restrained by an arbitrary calendar: A trickle of players around the country decided to redshirt and enter it, thereby ending their seasons.

A part of Missouri’s season ended last week in Columbia, South Carolina. Gone now is the part of the Tigers’ season that made it look so novel, so important. Gone are the chances to appear in the College Football Playoff — chances that were a core part of the build-up to the campaign.

That doesn’t mean the scene after Mizzou lost to South Carolina was as melodramatic as that sounds, though. MU’s playoff bid had been taking on water for some time and merely dipped below the surface because of the defeat.

Mathematically, or really just literally, Missouri’s season is not over. The Tigers (7-3 overall, 3-3 SEC) have two regular season and a bowl game to go, starting with a Southeastern Conference matchup at 3:15 p.m. Saturday at Mississippi State (2-8, 0-6) that’s to be televised on SEC Network.

“We got two games left,� coach Eli Drinkwitz said, “to go finish.�

Still on the table are macro-level moral victories such as getting to 10 wins this season — something that doesn’t exactly happen to programs like MU all the time — retaining a trophy against Arkansas and sending off a class of seniors that include some of Drinkwitz’s first players.

Is that motivating to the modern college football player? Maybe. If nothing else, those games are a chance to add to the highlight reels and stat logs that NFL scouts will be looking over soon, or to jockey for position on future depth charts.

That’s the test for Missouri now.

Something like how the Tigers’ defense rebounds against an underrated Mississippi State offense is worth watching during the game, but what is the real implication of how that goes? The defense gave up 109 points in the three games that sank the S.S. Playoff, and wasn’t that the real test?

These games will test Mizzou’s depth — not any young players getting called into duty, per se, but how deep a key trait among the Tigers really runs:

“We’ve got enough competitive character on this team,� Drinkwitz said. “We’ve got enough upperclassmen that know you can’t dwell on the past.�

It might not be so bad if some of those upperclassmen seek motivation in the past, though. It’s those players — and not the ones who’ve arrived via the portal over the last couple of years — who remember this stage of the season being a mad dash to bowl eligibility.

They’ve been on MU teams that could count their wins on one hand. That the Tigers could max out the counting potential of both hands ought to be appetizing to those players in particular.

This moment is the flip side of what Drinkwitz and Missouri built off the foundation of last season’s breakout.

Recruiting players and fans alike to Memorial Stadium on the premise that they just might be part of an historic playoff run carries the risk of what materializes in the absence of that chance.

There will be — and there are — emotions. The key, as Drinkwitz put it simply just a few yards and a few minutes removed from defeat last weekend, is in the nuance of Mizzou’s response:

“You can be disappointed, but we can’t be devastated,� he said.