Seven undefeated teams went in Saturday, and seven came out. But both Alabama and Iowa put their old-school, salt-of-the-earth personas through the ringer:

With Florida's tight struggle with Mississippi State for three-and-a-half quarters and USC's total inability to stop Oregon State in the second half, it was a harrowing evening in the top five, which may or may not rear its head in the polls in the short term. In the long term, though, championship survival is tradition.

In 1997, Nebraska's incredible "flea kicker" to force overtime in its eventual win at Missouri briefly dropped the Huskers from No. 1 to No. 3 in both , but I recall watching it at the time and thinking only the No. 1 team could have possibly made this play, in this fashion:

Eventually, the voters agreed: Nebraska won its last two in the regular season, blew out Texas A&M in the Big 12 Championship and then Peyton Manning-led Tennessee in the Orange Bowl, erasing those doubts and sharing the mythical championship with Michigan.

No team anywhere, ever has played the opportunistic, skin-of-the-teeth game better than Ohio State in 2002, which won five games by six points or less and two more -- including the Fiesta Bowl upset over No. 1 Miami -- in overtime. But none of those quite personified "life from the jaws of death" like Craig Krenzel's fourth-down heave to Michael Jenkins for the Buckeyes' only touchdown at Purdue:

OSU escaped Illinois in overtime the following week, hung on to beat Michigan by five and stunned the dominant 'Canes -- which had managed its own Houdini act against Florida State in October -- for the crystal ball, despite impressing practically no one at any point since mid-September.

Florida wasn't particularly impressive in 2006, either, following up a loss to Auburn with increasingly narrow wins over Georgia (21-14), Vanderbilt (25-19) and, most memorably -- and most damningly to the Gators' critics at the time -- South Carolina:

There's a reason Ohio State was a near-unanimous favorite in the mythical championship game less than two months later: The Buckeyes hadn't needed to block a kick against an unranked team at home to get there -- in fact, they'd hardly been challenged at all en route to 12-0, hadn't launched a fourth-quarter comeback or made any dramatic defensive stand at the end of a game. 

But no eventual champion in recent memory has lived on the edge like LSU in 2007, which not only lost twice in overtime (effectively eliminating the Tigers as a true model for any other aspiring contender) but had to deliver three dramatic fourth-quarter comebacks in a four-game span at midseason, beginning with the epic, game-winning touchdown drive to beat Florida and reaching its thrilling peak in the final seconds against Auburn two weeks later:

The Tigers had to come from behind to beat Alabama in the final minutes two weeks after the Flynn-to-Byrd miracle, and again to get past Tennessee in the SEC Championship game; hours later, LSU was bequeathed losses by No. 1 Missouri and No. 3 West Virginia to pave its unlikely path to the championship date with Ohio State, where the Tigers earned the title of best team that didn't always pull it out in the end, yet still finished on top.

Et cetera: Fill in your favorite "Don't you die on me!" moment here. Dream seasons always hang in the balance for the handful of teams good enough to be on the high wire to begin with. The fact that Alabama and Iowa -- and no doubt Florida, Texas, USC, TCU, et al at some point over the next month -- had to scrape by in photo finishes at the tape may be a sign of some intrinsic soft spot (passing game, anyone?) that will be their downfall in the stretch run. Or it may be the great escape that eventually defines all great seasons. We won't be able to discern transcendent virtue from fatal flaw for a while yet.