Newton was a game-changer, as always, helping Auburn to its ninth comeback win of this improbable season. He has now won the national title three straight years -- in 2008 as a backup to Tim Tebow at Florida, last year in junior college at Blinn and now with the Tigers.
If he goes pro - as some people expect -- this will mark the end of a tumultuous stay at Auburn, shadowed by an NCAA investigation into his failed recruitment by Mississippi State. The governing body cleared him to play before the SEC championship but said his father, Cecil, solicited money from the Bulldogs.
"Anything is possible," Newton said. "I guarantee, five or six months ago, that no one would bet their last dollar that Auburn would win the national championship. And now we're standing here."
Standing with a crystal football, the biggest jewel in a bowl season that, at times, felt never-ending, beginning on Dec. 18 with the BYU-UTEP game and wrapping up in Arizona with a most improbable finish.
The SEC improved to 7-0 in BCS title games. Four different teams from the conference have won it in this latest five-year run.
LSU. Florida twice. Alabama.
And now, Auburn, the school that has loads of tradition -- the Tiger Walk, the War Eagle yell and a case full of Heisman and other big-time individual trophies -- but not nearly as many titles to go with it. Bad luck in the polls doomed their one-loss season in 1983, probation kept them from capitalizing on a perfect record in 1993 and the vagaries of the BCS left them on the outside in 2004, maybe the most painful of all the snubs.
So, really, this one is for all the Bos and Beasleys and Terrys and Tracys in the Auburn family who came close but couldn't close the deal. And it fashions a nice symmetry with that team up the road - the Crimson Tide - which took home the Heisman and the same crystal championship trophy one short year ago.
Tide fans, of course, will remind you that it still has five more AP titles than the Tigers. But this celebration is going on at Toomer's Corner in Auburn, where the traditional toilet-papering of the drugstore and the rest of the street was going on in full force in the bitter cold as Monday night turned into Tuesday morning.
"Winning a championship for the Auburn family, I can't really describe it right now," Chizik said. "To try would probably cheapen it."
At Auburn, the words "War Eagle" would almost surely suffice.