Enjoy the Southeastern Conference championship game Saturday afternoon.

Alabama vs. Georgia.

Pay close attention. Relish it. You probably should have been there in Atlanta last night.

Whatever, you may never see its kind again.

Oh, it’s not going anywhere. The SEC announced Thursday that the big game will remain in Atlanta through at least 2031, which is where it belongs today, next year, forever and a day.

Atlanta is spread out over half of Georgia, but the SEC championship is fairly compact, with plenty of high-rise hotels and convenient watering holes in the vicinity of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

It makes Atlanta, similar to New Orleans, among the perfect spots for major sporting events.

But, even with the ideal locale locked in, the SEC can’t promise its championship will be the same.

I kind of doubt it. I’ve been to the seven of them that LSU played in, all since 2001.

For my money, only a national championship game can compare to it for night-before revelry, overall atmosphere and pregame electricity. It’s restaurant-quality taunting is what it is. College football at its best.

I suspect other conferences have the same experience, although, as we know, in the SEC, It Just Means More.

It will still mean a great deal.

But — get off my lawn! — there has been something neat and orderly about it when it has been the East Division vs. the West Division, which is the way conferences should be divided.

Each division had its own identity. In some cases, there was even an inkling of divisional pride.

That part goes away starting next year when Oklahoma and Texas join the party and all 16 conference members — which is too many for anybody’s good — get thrown into one big free-for-all.

Yes, just when everybody was starting to understand that Missouri really is in the SEC — and really good this year — it will get more convoluted, more confusing, more vague.

So after the 16 teams play half (eight) of their conference brethren, the top two will play for the conference championship. They might well have played the week before. There have been rematches from the regular season in the past, of course, but it didn’t seem to take any of the shine off of the party, uh, the game, I guess it is.

Next year, they could be from the same division — oh, wait, right, there won’t be any divisions, which is a shame and will take some getting used to.

I suspect we’ll soon look back on the current arrangement with wistful nostalgia, just another victim of the money-grab for conferences to swallow each other up.

Side thought: On the other end of the spectrum, just wondering, but next year will the Pac-2 — Oregon State and Washington State — end their season with a championship game?

Anyway, to recap the real SEC championship game era:

LSU is 5-2 in its Atlanta trips, the fourth-most appearances by any team (behind Alabama, Florida and Georgia) and tied with Bama (10-4) for the best winning percentage (smaller sample size, but same .714 percentage).

Twice LSU has gone into the game when it didn’t matter if the Tigers won or lost, except for the conference trophy. The 2011 and 2019 LSU teams had been assured in advance that the former had already clinched a spot in the two-team, computer-driven Bowl Championship Series system and nothing was keeping the Joe Burrow Tigers from the four-team College Football Playoff.

But both of those teams seemed proud as could be to raise the SEC banner at midfield and parade it around the perimeter before moving to bigger games.

After this year, unless both teams are undefeated, it might seem like you had regular-season champion and a tournament champion.

This year’s game may be the oddest for the uncertainty about what it means going in.

It involves only minimal potential anarchy from other conference championship games.

But going into today’s game, there’s a chance that an Alabama upset of Georgia would put both teams in the CFP, which would cause a nationwide epidemic of SEC envy (outrage).

There’s also a chance that an Alabama victory would, for the first time ever, mean a CFP would commence without an SEC team in it.

Which might force the SEC to secede from the Union.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com