You know what’s on the line here: Boise State and Virginia Tech both take the field tonight in Washington, D.C., harboring national ambitions that can only be met with a high-profile, skeptic-silencing win on a grand national stage. The winner (especially if it’s Boise) will be a step closer to a run on the top of the polls. The loser (especially if it’s Boise) will be finished in any and all discussions concerning the national championship, and in the Broncos’ case, concerning the BCS in general.

Strip away the big-money trappings, and Broncos-Hokies could be the Game of the Year on its own merits, one of only three regular-season showdowns between preseason top-10 teams all season. With the potential stakes, probably no single game for at least the next months will have as much impact on the direction of the polls and national championship debate.

One thing it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, is a referendum on Boise State as a program: At this point, with seven conference championships in eight years and two BCS wins and four wins over teams that finished ranked in the top 10 since 2006, the Broncos are long past proving they “belong” in the national discussion every time they show up on national television. How many times can they keep proving it? They proved it against Oklahoma in the ’07 Fiesta Bowl, again at Oregon two years later, and again last year against Oregon and then TCU in another Fiesta Bowl triumph. In eight years, they’ve never undermined their case by blowing a single WAC game they’ve been favored to win.

They’ve justified their existence here – they wouldn’t be ranked in the top five if they hadn’t, or in a regular season opener of this magnitude. And it wouldn’t be a pick-em according to Vegas.

On the same note, there’s some considerable irony in the fact that Boise’s big national showcase comes against Virginia Tech, an outfit that faced that ran into the same barriers at the peak of its rise into the national consciousness in the late nineties. Before the BCS, the historically nondescript Hokies had earned their stripes with Big East championships and subsequent bids to the Sugar and Orange Bowls in 1995 and 1996, but when the Michael Vick-led squad ran the table without a truly marquee win in 1999, the clamor for a more tradition-rich foil for No. 1 Florida State in the Sugar Bowl (specifically, one-loss Nebraska, just two years removed from its third national championship in four years in 1997) dominated the championship conversation in November. Virginia Tech advanced to the title game, acquitted itself well in a narrow loss to the supremely talented ‘Noles, and stands a decade later as a BCS mainstay with the best record by far in the post-expansion ACC.

Boise is approaching a similar stage on the same trajectory from upstart to gatekeeper. Tonight is about moving on to the next stage, officially passing from a fuzzy underdog that can be safely relegated to one of the preliminary BCS games and a token spot in the top 10 to a legitimate frontrunner that can’t be ignored – love them or hate them, WAC schedule or no WAC schedule – in the national picture. That’s the mandate for this particular team, which comes back so perfectly calibrated to make that leap with literally the entire lineup back (save cornerback Kyle Wilson) from a team that felt jilted by its obvious second-class status last year. So much of the system is out of their hands – how many other undefeated teams will stake a claim on the title game at the end of the year? Are the polls really ready to give them the benefit of the doubt? The computers? –