It has an irresistible taste you just can’t get enough of, but it’s easy to forget how sweet it is.

Once you get the tiniest morsel of winning into your system you will fight, you will scratch and you will crawl to get more. It just tastes that good. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Ask the Kent State football team.

Last year, players got that taste in their mouths. Last year, they could smell a Mid-American Conference title. Last year, they stumbled to the finish line, dropping four of their last five games.

“We were knocking on the door,” coach Doug Martin said. “I think our players getting a taste of that has made them even hungrier to get it done.”

It’s amazing what a few ingredients can do for a program. Mix some stingy defense and heavy doses of newly found confidence and it boils down to a winning spirit.

Hardly fitting of the tradition Kent State football has set forth – a tradition of losing.

With a lifetime winning percentage that doesn’t even reach .400 – 293 wins, 468 losses and 28 ties – and without a Mid-American Conference title since 1972, I think it is safe for me to come to that conclusion.

But this season has the makings of one where none of that could matter because the players got a little taste of what it is like to win. And any one of them will tell you just how sweet it is.

Ask senior defensive back Jack Williams who was oozing with confidence at the MAC Media day in Detroit last month.

Just ask him about this season and his face lights up as he proclaims that anything else than a MAC championship is unacceptable for this team.

Ask coach Martin and he will tell you how much more of a desire these players have this season to go out and perform.

And it is all because they got to taste it just a little bit, and, hopefully, it’s enough to awaken them from their football hibernation.

Tomorrow night when the Flashes get ready to kick off the 2007 season, they will be licking their lips with the glimmer of the MAC Championship in their eye for the first time in a long time.

Contact sports editor Jonas Fortune at [email protected].