For the first six decades of his existence, Vic Roos would have gladly taken a lifetime of 6-6 seasons for his alma mater, Indiana. Now, after Curt Cignetti led the Hoosiers to a once-unthinkable 16-0 season and the College Football Playoff national championship?“Absolutely not,” said Roos, an IU season-ticket holder since 1984. “The bar has been raised.”Most of the Indiana fan base shares his feelings, according to recent fan surveys by The Athletic. Those submissions, plus phone calls with a dozen still-giddy Hoosiers supporters, provide a window into a fascinating question without modern precedent:What did a national title run do for the diehard fans of one of college football’s all-time losingest programs? The top-line takeaway is that Indiana has the most optimistic fan base in the country, according to the responses from our annual Hope-O-Meter. What, exactly, that means going forward is nuanced for supporters like 2005 graduate Eric Martin.“Half of it’s like, this is gravy. That was the most unbelievable season ever and beyond what I ever expected to happen in my lifetime …” Martin said.The other half?“If we went back to where we were three years ago, that’d be really disappointing.”Is Indiana and Curt Cignetti the best story in college sports?Scott DochtermanThree years ago, the Hoosiers were finishing with a losing record for the 26th time in 29 seasons. But that was in what 1979 graduate Les Morris calls the B.C. era: Before Cignetti. Since Cignetti was hired in November 2023, Indiana is 27-2 with two College Football Playoff appearances.A significant portion of Indiana fans expect these heights to continue. Of the 785 submissions in The Athletic’s recent survey, almost 19 percent said the Hoosiers should be perennial championship contenders like Ohio State and Georgia.Most, however, aimed a little lower: 46 percent expect Indiana to be a regular CFP team, while a quarter would be satisfied with perennial bowl appearances and an occasional trip to the Playoff. Those parameters spiritually put Indiana somewhere between Oregon and Iowa.“I think Iowa’s ceiling is too low for us right now, to be honest,” said Kevin Harrell, a 1998 graduate and Bloomington native. “It’s weird saying that.”Disbelief is a common theme among Indiana fans; even the ones with championship flags waving in the front yard still can’t fully fathom what Fernando Mendoza and company did. That feeling helps explain the final 10 percent of respondents — ones like Chad Davis, who watched his Hoosiers lose in the January 1968 Rose Bowl and waited another 58 years for them to return to that stage.“If things went to hell in a handbasket,” Davis said, “I would die happy knowing we got this far.”Such a slide seems unlikely this year. The Hoosiers sit at No. 6 in the preseason AP Top 25 with a realistic shot at repeating as national champions. Projections from The Athletic’s Austin Mock give Indiana a 68 percent chance to make the Playoff and a 9 percent chance to win it all again.IU fans, in some ways, are even more optimistic. Almost half (48 percent) of respondents said a CFP appearance is the baseline expectation for a successful year. Another 31 percent put the bar at a CFP win.Only 5.5 percent framed the season as national title or bust. For context, that figure is far below our (unscientific) results from two other legitimate contenders, Ohio State (25.3 percent) and Notre Dame (21.2 percent).Sam Schlegel can explain the disconnect. Schlegel has been going to IU games since he was 4 years old, so he was so conditioned to losing that he felt a here-we-go-again pain when the Hoosiers allowed a 75-yard touchdown run on the first play of last season’s opener (an eventual 27-14 win over Old Dominion). All those losses remain in the background as he considers his realistic hopes for this fall.“I refuse to be the fan that if we go 8-4 this year will say, ‘The sky is falling,’” Schlegel said. “I just can’t. With our past, I’m just so joyful and appreciative of what we got to experience. I refuse to lose sight of the history of Indiana football.”Several respondents compared IU’s championship to the Cubs finally ending their 108-year World Series drought in 2016, but that’s not quite right. Probability alone in a 30-team MLB made a Chicago title more realistic than IU topping 130-plus teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision.“You figured that the Cubs’ turn would come up eventually,” said Morris, an Indianapolis resident who’s originally from the Chicago suburb of Northbrook. “I didn’t think I’d be alive to see it, but I was… It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that IU would win a national football championship.”Although the coach who made it happen, Cignetti, has shown no signs of slowing down, the 65-year-old won’t be leading the Hoosiers forever. Then what? Will Indiana slip again, the way Virginia Tech has after Frank Beamer’s retirement? Colorado shared the 1990 national title with Georgia Tech but has finished ranked only six times since Bill McCartney retired after the 1994 season.Even in a post-Cignetti future, Indiana fans don’t envision much of a regression. The university and athletic department have invested too much in football for the Hoosiers to fall back into irrelevance and a parade of 5-7s.“There’s no going back now,” said Will Bernacchi, a 2016 Indiana graduate.Roos agrees.He doesn’t expect Indiana to be another Ohio State or Alabama; the Hoosiers can’t match that much tradition immediately. He does, however, believe the Hoosiers are being disrespected by the prognosticators expecting the reigning national champs to finish third in their conference. IU’s first real test comes against Ohio State on Oct. 17, a day before Roos turns 61.“You know what I want for my birthday?” Roos said. “An ass-whopping the day before against Ohio State.”