With Abilene Christian football sitting at 0-3, questions have arisen about what is going to change. The Wildcats have one more test before conference play, and therefore a limited amount of time if they would like their hopes of a conference three-peat to stay alive.

Head coach Keith Patterson has faced this type of tribulation before, and the team he’s pointed to as his own reference point is a group he coached nearly three decades ago, 238 miles northeast of ACU’s campus.

In 1997, Patterson took over as head coach at Ardmore High School in Oklahoma and immediately turned the program around, guiding the Tigers to a 7-4 record after a 3-7 finish the year before. It was the kind of debut that suggested Ardmore had found its guy.

Then 1998 happened, and the early results looked to take a step backward.

A front-loaded schedule buried the Tigers early, and they stumbled to 1-4 through five games. For a team that had just posted a winning season, it was the exact kind of stretch that invites doubt.

But Ardmore didn’t stay buried.

Over the next six games, they won five, clawing back to 5-5 heading into their regular-season finale against Lawton MacArthur, a game that, by Patterson’s own account, decided far more than just the final score. With the season on the line, Ardmore got a 75-yard touchdown pass in the closing seconds to beat MacArthur 22-14, punching their ticket into the Class 5A playoffs. Patterson has pointed to that moment as the one that changed everything, the play that finally gave his players the belief they’d been missing all year.

What followed was a signature statement. Ardmore drew Oklahoma City Douglass, a 9-1 team that had beaten them in their last two playoff meetings. Douglass came in ranked No. 2 in the entire state of Oklahoma. The setup looked like a quiet exit for a team that had already overachieved just by qualifying.

Instead, the two sides played dead even for four quarters, the score climbing together until it was locked at 27-27 at the final horn. Overtime was just as tight. Ardmore came out on top of the exchange, 7-6, sealing a 34-33 win.

A team that had been left for dead at 1-4 in September had authored a last-second miracle just to make the playoffs, then backed it up with an overtime win over a program that had owned them for years. Final record: 6-6, capped by the two biggest plays of their season back-to-back.

Patterson wasn’t done building at Ardmore, either. The following year, in 1999, the Tigers came back, finished 10-2, and won their district. That season turned out to be his last at Ardmore. Patterson moved on to Allen High School in Texas, his final high school coaching stop, before making the jump to college football as an assistant at Tulsa in 2003.

It’s easy to see why Patterson points to that 1998 team when he talks about this year’s Wildcats. The shape of the story is identical: a brutal start, a locker room that could easily lose belief in itself, and a schedule that isn’t finished yet. Ardmore didn’t need to be the best team in the field in 1998. They needed one play to believe, and one more to prove it wasn’t a fluke.

Whether Abilene Christian finds its version of that MacArthur game remains to be seen. But if history means anything, Patterson has engineered this exact turn before.