OK, Brian Kelly, it’s your move now.

Notre Dame still hasn’t won a national championship since 1988.

Presumably the LSU coach was true to his word and was pulling for his former team— as stubborn as the Irish were — as Notre Dame suffered a 34-23 loss to Ohio State in the College Football Playoff championship game Monday night.

But you have to admit his life got a little easier when the Buckeyes, dominant for most of the game, held off a pesky Notre Dame comeback and won an entertaining season finale.

For now, at least, he doesn’t have to explain why he never won a national championship at Notre Dame, a place that gets a lot of national attention — love, hate or jealousy — whether it’s winning, losing or just being annoyingly aloof.

Mind you, it wasn’t a dominant theme leading into the first championship of the 12-game era. Still, an inordinate amount of the pregame build-up seemed obsessed with trying to get Kelly to admit that, c’mon, he didn’t want to be proved wrong in thinking LSU might be a better career path to a national championship. That’s basically what he said when he left South Bend three years ago.

I don’t doubt his honesty on either front but, even if he had mixed feelings tugging at his ego, what was he supposed to say? That Notre Dame was a fraud?

You almost figured that if the Irish had won, the TV trucks would be parked on Kelly’s front lawn Tuesday for his morning walk, chasing him down to beg the question, “Yeah, coach, what do you think now? And how was that Texas Bowl, anyway?”

Apparently there was no right answer about his rooting interest, but the questions would have been a cleverly disguised version of, “Maybe all they needed was a coach?”

It didn’t help that his Notre Dame successor, Marcus Freeman, seems more naturally likable than Kelly, more of a “players’ coach” as they say, and, for that matter, never tried to fake a Southern accent.

It was hard to root against him, even fans who love to hate the Irish.

Freeman’s easy manner probably solved the dilemma for a lot of viewers used to pulling against both Ohio State and Notre Dame.

Not to worry. Kelly can rest easy now.

In the end, Freeman ran into the same pesky problem Kelly had in his one national championship appearance and two other playoff trips with the Irish.

The opposing coach, in this case Ohio State’s Ryan Day, had the far better team. Simple as that — there are notable exceptions, but the best team usually wins. In Kelly’s Notre Dame tenure, it was twice to Nick Saban and Alabama (42-14 in 2013 and 31-14 in 2020) and once to Clemson and Dabo Swinney (30-3 in 2018).

But nothing that happened to the Irish had Notre Dame fans longing for Kelly.

It looked like a typical Flopping Irish playoff appearance after Ohio State shrugged off an early 7-0 Notre Dame lead and scored the next 31 points with relative ease.

But there was fight in Freeman’s Irish, enough to have the Buckeyes squirming in the fourth quarter.

Freeman will likely be excused by the rank-and-file Irish fans for an ill-advised late field goal attempt that would only have turned a two-score game (31-15) into a two-score game of a different flavor (31-18). Instead, it doinked off an upright and the drive was wasted.

Stuff happens. And although obviously outmanned, the Irish looked more at home on the big stage than Kelly’s Notre Dame teams had in the past.

Meanwhile, Kelly’s clock at LSU is ticking.

With a veteran talented quarterback in Garrett Nussmeier and an NCAA transfer portal class ranked No. 1 in the country, he’ll enter his fourth season in Baton Rouge with what should be his best team.

He won’t be under the same pressure as Ohio State’s Day, who had endured whispers that he needed the Monday’s championship to secure his job.

But Kelly needs to get LSU away from the sideshow bowls and at least into the 12-team playoff.

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

After all, if Notre Dame can do it, how tough can it be?

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