Please excuse Kosmo.

He always gets a little nostalgic at this point of the season.

He starts remembering all the preseason planning and hype that happens in the summer, when players are in shells and shorts, playing 7-on-7.

He remembers all the early games that give you a glimpse of who’s going to be good, and who might struggle.

And all the points at which he starts to think ‘this could be a team that ends up in Ford Field.’

He also starts waxing nostalgic about all the different finals he’s seen over the years, at Ford Field and at the Silverdome before that.

All the title games for Catholic Central, Brother Rice, Harrison, Lakes and St. Mary’s. All the championship runs by the OAA powers, Lake Orion, Clarkston, Adams and West Bloomfield.

All the times he was still shaking off the effects of l-tryptophan from the Thanksgiving turkey when the first finals game of the weekend rolled around.

This year, he had to wait a minute to get the crystal ball out of the cave for the final time, thanks to Penn State-Michigan State pre-empting the normal first day of the finals, but Kosmo doesn’t want to dwell on that right now.

There’s just one game left on the docket that falls under Kosmo’s purview now.

Southfield A&T vs. Belleville in Sunday night’s season finale.

Last game of the 2023 season.

End of the road.

Win it all or wait until next year.

Go big or go home.

(Kosmo’s clearing out his bag of cliches — won’t need those again for a while, and doesn’t want them to get stale.)

If he’s gonna be honest — full disclosure — sometimes it’s been hard to picture Southfield teams here on this stage.

It’s not that they didn’t have talent.

It was just that over the years it seemed like A&T — or the Southfield-Lathrup Chargers and Southfield Bluejays before the merger — always had something that tripped them up. And a lot of times, it was self-inflicted.

Now, that’s not the case.

Just like it’s not the Same Old Lions (Thursday’s result notwithstanding) on this same field, it’s not been Same Old Southfield this year. This is not your father’s Southfield team.

Their first four games were all one-score affairs, as was the West Bloomfield playoff rematch. And when you come away with more than one win in a season in games that come down to the final play — you know you’ve got things going in the right way.

“I think part of it is just our players and our teammates. We have a lot of seniors, so that’s a big thing. We’re very mature, more than last year. We’re more disciplined,” senior quarterback Isaiah Marshall told Kosmo’s spies, after leading the Warriors back to win against West Bloomfield in the final 54 seconds of the semifinal, a situation that might’ve been a stumbling block for previous Southfield teams. “And I just think that in big games, we know how to handle it and we know how to not fold under pressure. So that’s a good thing.”

It is indeed.

It’s part of the maturation process of a program, and champions have to go through it.

In the last half of Kurt Richardson’s tenure at Clarkston, the Wolves went from an Oakland County power to a statewide power. West Bloomfield was not a powerhouse, churning out D-I talent and district titles before Ron Bellamy took over, and took it to new heights.

Even A&T’s opponent, Belleville, had to go through it.

For all that the Tigers have dominated the D-I landscape over the last half-dozen years, they weren’t always a power. Kosmo remembers guys like Kris Jenkins (the original), Cullen Jenkins, the Gold brothers — Ian, Jason, Jeremy — all going through the program, without much of a postseason dent.

The Tigers won their first-ever district title all the way back in … 2018.

Then it took them three tries to get past the semifinals, losing to Chippewa Valley in 2018, Brighton in 2019 and West Bloomfield in 2020, before finally capturing a state title with a win over Adams in 2021.

Now they haven’t lost since Week 3 of the 2021 season.

Is it a tall task that A&T is taking on? Absolutely.

Are they the underdogs in most peoples’ minds, going into the game? Probably.

But that’s fine. Nobody on the A&T sideline will begrudge Belleville its accolades for what it’s accomplished over the last six seasons.

The Warriors just know that’s where they want to be. And this is the step they’ll need to take to get there.

Kosmo has a feeling they’ll get there, sooner or later.

Kosmo says: Southfield A&T