Altitude Camp: Where the Season Is Quietly Won

Three weeks on a mountain road, far from cameras: inside the pre-season ritual coaches refuse to skip. The details, assembled from interviews and documents reviewed by The News Tribune, sketch a picture more textured than the headline suggests.

The performance rewrote expectations that had hardened into consensus, and it did so in the most public way possible: on the field, with the table watching.

This looks small until you remember where we started.

The financial gap to the league's aristocrats remains a chasm. What has narrowed, game by game, is the gap in conviction.

The wider picture

The season moves on, as seasons do, with a ledger of what was won and what was merely survived. Next fixture, improbably, is already on the calendar.