… I’m still not sure how West Virginia won or how West Virginia didn’t lose yesterday, but the Mountaineers are living right these days. They’ve won 13 of 15 games, and on Saturday they set a new high for regular-season victories in the Big 12 and matched a high for conference wins in the Big 12.

And now we can say this: Saturday’s game against No. 10 Oklahoma will do a lot to decide the Big 12 title and serve as a — I almost can’t believe this — College Football Playoff elimination game.

“Oklahoma’s going to be a decent test for us,” linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton said. “I can’t wait.”

WVU was 3-17 in Holgorsen’s first five seasons when it scored fewer than 30 points, including 12 in a row before the start of this season. The Mountaineers are 3-1 in those games this year, and they’d need some time to credit all the contributors Saturday.

“I think everyone would agree with this one thing,” Holgorsen said with his athletic director, Shane Lyons, seated in the back of the room. “This team has figured out how to play together and win games. It’s figured out if you play together and do it for four quarters, the team’s going to figure out a way to win. It’s what we did. It wasn’t pretty, but I thought the defense was excellent.”

WVU cannot win the Big 12 without beating the Sooners, who are remarkably the only ranked team WVU has seen in this 13-2 run of play. A win at home against the only Big 12 team the Mountaineers haven’t beaten and then wins at Iowa State and at home against Baylor — sans Seth Russell — plus an Oklahoma State loss either at TCU or at Oklahoma gives Dana Holgorsen’s sixth squad the crown and perhaps more.

After what happened yesterday and with some other relevant games remaining, there’s a whole lot on the table, and WVU has a say in a bunch of it. Not all of it, but a bunch. Still no word on the time and channel for Saturday’s game. It appears College GameDay will be out west, though. (Wrong! Not out west for Washington State v. Colorado, but to Western Michigan!)

Anyhow, back to the mildly inexplicable nature of that game and outcome. Texas is extremely talented. Big. Fast. Strong. A lot of the best high school players in the country the past five years were in burnt orange Saturday, and you could tell.

WVU, meanwhile, had one healthy running back, and Kennedy McKoy is a true freshman. There were four healthy defensive linemen, and one was true freshman Reese Donahue, who tried and tried and tried, all the way through the 100th snap, to get around Texas left tackle and certain first-round pick Connor Willians. WVU used a couple of cornerbacks, but Maurice Fleming and Antonio Crawford were hurting. Really, only Rasul Douglas was healthy among the regulars, and he was terrific.

But combine those concerns with the 100 Texas snaps, 35 carries for the nation’s leading rusher, four turnovers — three interceptions in one quarter for what might be the first time in school history —  and five punts and seven points in the final 44:11. Pit them against Texas. At Texas. The Longhorns were 4-0 at home. They’d won four straight against top-12 teams.

And WVU won.

Look, that wasn’t extraordinarily pretty or encouraging. I’m not organizing any parades. But that’s a worthy evaluation of the health of a program.

“It’s a product of what Coach has built here,” said defensive coordinator Tony Gibson. “We’re a football team. We’re not an offense. We’re not a defense. That’s what he’s done, and he talks about it daily. When we play good, when we’re together as a team, we’re really good. When we don’t, then obviously that comes back to bite us, but we have a football team. That’s what you’re seeing.”

The Mountaineers (8-1, 5-1 Big 12) couldn’t have scored points without their offense, couldn’t have held Texas to its lowest point total without its defense and couldn’t have enjoyed a meaningful advantage in field position without special teams.

Now WVU gets to host No. 10 Oklahoma (8-2, 7-0) Saturday in a game it cannot lose if it wants to win its first Big 12 title and its first conference championship since 2011.

“We’re expecting to win every game we go into,” said quarterback Skyler Howard, who played some of his best football early and had some of his worst results later. “It doesn’t matter who we play, where we play, what time we play. We expect to win.”

This bears repeating: In Holgorsen’s first five seasons, WVU was 3-17 when it scored fewer than 30 points. It was on a 12-game losing streak in said games before the start of this season, where the Mountaineers are now 3-1. This is not the brand of football he wanted or wants to play. He wanted and still wants to score much more, but WVU is still winning thanks to the the combined contributions of all three sides of the ball, to say nothing of an understanding and appreciation of that.

And on Saturday, the Mountaineers were again defined and saved by their defense, which kept D’Onta Foreman out of the end zone and held Texas to its lowest point total of the season. While the offense could not conjure up a play when it needed to for the better part of three quarters, the defense — and a defender on special teams — made a play to shape the game again and again.

Not one of those was bigger than Kyzir White’s sack-strip-forced fumble-rumble recovery. It’s the play of the season right now, and Tony Gibson, who might know magic, saw it coming.

“I saw Foreman get up limping on the play before and thought, ‘Well, here’s a great opportunity on third-and-short. They’re probably not going to run him,’ ” Gibson said. “We dialed it up.”

White sacked Buechele on the same blitz earlier in the game and it worked again at a critical moment. The officials initially ruled Buechele down but reviewed the play and saw the ball come out and White recover it.

“I saw a beast come off the edge and make a hit,” Benton said. “That guy is great, man. Great. I said that at the beginning of the year, but he’s playing some really good football now. He’s just physically so gifted and makes plays a lot of people can’t. Mentally, he’s coming along a lot better now. Put those together and he could be one of the best players in the league, in my opinion.”