Washington shows the nation it has arrived with rout of No. 7 Stanford

Mark the date: September 30, 2016.

You’re likely to look back on it one day.

If 10-win seasons become the norm, Rose Bowls the expectation and the AP Top 25 a permanent residence, someone is going to ask, “When did this new era of Huskies dominance begin?”

And you’re going to respond with that date.

No. 10 Washington didn’t politely ask the nation to pay attention to it Friday. It yelled into the nation’s ear with a loudspeaker and said, “We’re here!”

That 44-6 whooping of seventh-ranked Stanford wasn’t a win so much as it was a proclamation. The Chris Petersen-coached Huskies have been in Seattle for three years now, but Friday is when they arrived.

“That was the best game we’ve ever played. Everything was on point,” Huskies linebacker Joe Mathis said. “This is like a dream come true.”

It’s hard to think of a more appropriate setting for a coming-out party like that. It had the largest home crowd since Husky Stadium’s renovation, a national-television audience and the gatekeepers of the Pac-12 North lining up on the other side of the ball. It even had UW’s 1991 national-championship team on hand to pass the figurative torch.

And once these Huskies had it in their hands, they ran with it at Lamborghini speed.

Let’s be honest here: Nobody could have predicted that. We knew the Huskies had talent. We knew they had a top-tier secondary and a quarterback brimming with potential. But we didn’t know they could pummel Stanford as though it were Idaho or Portland State — overwhelming the Cardinal in every facet of the game.

Friday’s win was the Huskies’ largest margin of victory against a top-10 opponent ever. And while the beatdown was stunning as it happened, the reality is that it could have been worse.

“Stanford, they’ve been the bullies for a long time,” Huskies safety Budda Baker said. “We knew it was a packed house, and we just had to have fun with it.”

If there were any questions about UW’s potential heading into Friday night, the Huskies answered each of them in all caps.

Quarterback Jake Browning? Legitimate Heisman candidate now. The sophomore blew Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey out of the water as the best offensive player on the field, completing 15 of his 21 passes for 210 yards and three touchdowns. That’s 17 TDs on the year.

The front seven? Unreal. Washington’s back end is considered to be among the nation’s best, but for the guys up front to tally eight sacks against a team that had given up just four all year was incredible. Same with holding McCaffrey to 49 yards rushing.

The fan base? Wild. There were 72,027 people on hand for this game, and every one of them needed a lozenge afterward. Petersen said he had never seen anything like it during his tenure at Washington, and players universally praised the fans for providing a boost.

“The environment was awesome,” Browning said. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”

Perhaps the most impressive part about Friday was the game plan. Playing smash-mouth football against Stanford is like trying to out-slug George Foreman. That’s the Cardinal’s game. Owning the line of scrimmage is how Stanford was able to ascend to the top of the Pac-12.

But in this instance, Washington dominated the trenches. It bulldozed its way to 214 rushing yards, prevented Browning from being sacked and breezed through the Cardinal’s offensive line as though it didn’t exist. It was identify theft at its cruelest, and the Huskies got away with it.

Now the only question is whether they can keep it up.

Petersen has been around long enough to know that sometimes you can win too handily. He has seen teams go from great to ghastly in a matter of days, and with Oregon trying to extend its winning streak vs. UW to 13 years, there’s potential for a letdown in Eugene next Saturday.

But something seems different about the Dawgs this year. They don’t get rattled — they just rattle off wins.

Friday night, the Huskies showed the nation they are not overrated. The next step? To show that they’re not done.