Remember October? Neither does West Virginia, which is making the most of the football season’s 11th hour by winning in the 11th month. A simple — that’s the right word, right? — 49-0 win against Kansas moved the Mountaineers to 3-0 this month.

WVU was 3-9 in its first three Novembers in the Big 12.

To hear the players and the coaches talk about it, they never wavered when the season was at its wobbliest moments. I wrote about this before, but it’s topical again because it’s being referenced again. The seniors and their head coach had a meaningful meeting before the first November game, and that chat didn’t reset or refocus as much as it did remind everyone about what they were trying to achieve.

You have to think it’s worked, because Saturday’s game was over before it started … and then the Mountaineers hit for 28 points in the first quarter.

But before they boarded their buses at 8:15 a.m. and then rained rushing yards on the Jayhawks, they met in a conference room at their hotel.

“I told them to be down there at 6:45, that the meeting would start at 6:45,” coach Dana Holgorsen said. “They were all bright-eyed at 6:30, so we started 15 minutes early. That told me that they were ready to go.”

Cornerback Terrell Chestnut forced a fumble recovered by safety Jarrod Harper on Kansas’ second play, and WVU’s Rushel Shell followed with the first of his team’s five rushing touchdowns. On the second play of the next Kansas drive, Chestnut guessed right on the receiver’s route, intercepted the throw and returned it 32 yards for a score.

The Mountaineers led 28-0 at the end of the first quarter, their most productive quarter since scoring 35 points in the second quarter of the 2012 Orange Bowl against Clemson. Not that WVU needed any help, but that quieted much of the crowd of 21,415 at Memorial Stadium that weathered the 11 a.m. kickoff and 20 mph winds that made the 36-degree day feel 13 degrees cooler at the start.

“If ever there were a situation they shouldn’t have been ready to play, this is it,” Holgorsen said. “All due respect to Kansas, but it was cold and windy and there’s nobody here and all that stuff. But our guys didn’t care about that. It was all about us.”

Road win. No suspense. Ground game. Defense. That was about as as-expected a game as the most optimistic forecast could foresee. And it came about with a quarterback who, as we mentioned in the pregame, didn’t practice much during the week and was only greenlighted Friday.

Skyler Howard nevertheless wore some gloves Saturday and again hid his right hand from reporters when he was out in public.

But he was good. Like, save one pass, really good. I don’t know if you can or will forgive that pass, but it was inconsequential, and it was overshadowed by all the other good things he did, free of neither pain nor worry.

He completed 13 of 22 passes for 133 yards, a touchdown and an interception — and that one was a deep throw high into a stiff wind that knocked the ball down and let a defensive back recover. He ran nine times for a career-best 129 yards and a touchdown.

Howard said the only time he thought about his hand was when he was running.

“There were times when maybe you put it away,” he said. “When you’re around a lot of people you just get it out of the way. You don’t want to get it smashed. You don’t want to stick it out there and stiff-arm or anything, which is naturally what I like to do.”

Howard joins Pat White, Rasheed Marshall, Major Harris, Oliver Luck and Kirk Lewis as the only Mountaineers quarterbacks to rush and pass for 100 yards in a game. Lewis and Luck did it once, Harris did it five times, Marshall three times and White 13 times.

So in sum, a road game in November with a one-handed QB, a left guard who played but a handful of snaps, a left tackle sitting out again, a backup center playing guard, a starting receiver last week watching in sweats this week, and the Mountaineers weren’t so much as troubled.

“What’s hard is every team has the goal of winning the conference. That’s everybody’s goal,” Holgorsen said. “Once that doesn’t happen, there are teams that kind of fade a little bit. These seniors, we’ve had talks about the big picture more than any senior class I’ve talked with. I think they understand the big picture.

“When we lost those four games in October, they didn’t lose sight of what the big picture is. At that point, we set a goal to finish better than any team I’ve been a part of here. We have a chance to do that.”

Well, that’s not entirely possible, because WVU was 10-3 in 2011 and won the Orange Bowl, but let’s understand they’re talking about their Big 12 existence.

An eight-win regular season is still on the table and seven wins seems feasible. Iowa State choked away a game Saturday, and the Cyclones have seemingly nothing left to play for, and who knows if that soon includes their head coach. The winner in that game was Kansas State, which gets Kansas next and, presumably, a fifth win, which means the Wildcats could be gunning for bowl eligibility — insert speculation about Bill Snyder here — at home in the final game of the regular season.

But given what you’ve seen this month, are you going to count out WVU on the first Saturday of December?