SOUTH BEND, Ind. — This doesn’t seem right: The defending national runner-up is 0-2?

Can’t be.

No way.

The team that won 14 games just a season ago, perhaps the most valuable brand in college football, playing at home in front of a rocking environment on a beautiful fall night, that team, Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish, has zero wins and two losses?

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Two games. Three weeks. No wins.

Despite an bye last week, despite all that returning talent (14 starters), the Irish are on the very cusp — well before October even arrives — of playoff elimination.

Notre Dame followed a season-opening 27-24 loss at Miami with a nail-biting, heart-pounding, scoring fest of a game against Texas A&M here on a brisk Saturday night — a 41-40 loss that will, perhaps, be most remembered not for its wild ending (a last-second A&M TD pass after a botched Notre Dame extra point) but for the Irish’s pursuit of the ever-present goal here of winning a national title.

Are the Irish already out of chase?

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“The future is uncertain,” coach Marcus Freeman said afterward when asked if that goal still existed for this team. “I don’t know what the playoff number is.”

Newsflash: A 10-2 Notre Dame is likely advancing to the 12-team College Football Playoff, with the caveat that at least one of their first two opponents is also good enough to be in the field. Let’s be real here: The Irish lost to two ranked teams by a combined four points with chances to win each in the fourth quarter.

Miami and Texas A&M aren’t the Little Sisters of the Poor, more like the Big Brothers of the Rich. They employ proven, experienced head coaches with talent-laden rosters, each not so shy about spending big money to land big players.

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Those are the positives if you wear Irish blue and gold.

The negatives? Whew boy, that mostly belongs with Notre Dame’s defense. And they know it too.

“We take accountability for that,” cornerback Leonard Moore told a crowd of reporters after the game. “No more going to practice and trying to have fun.”

Things are getting serious here, already bad enough that Freeman was asked in the post-game news conference if he’d contemplate a defensive play-calling change.

“It’s not the calls. It’s the execution. I’ve always believed that,” said Freeman, himself the program’s former defensive play-caller. “A play-caller can be overrated.”

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Let’s get to the final sequence.

Texas A&M scored in the final seconds on a fourth-and-goal from the 11-yard line. Quarterback Marcel Reed, under pressure for a rare time on this night, rolled left, turned his shoulders toward the end zone and rifled a pass toward tight end Nate Boerkircher. Boerkircher, all 6-foot-4, 250 pounds of him, corralled the pass a couple yards deep into the end zone, with Notre Dame linebacker Drayk Bowen draped over his back.

“I knew they were going to motion the receiver so I had the tight end,” Bowen said, reliving the play. “I thought [Boerkircher] was going to run the wheel and he ran out and up. Made a good throw and catch.”

Randy Bond’s extra point — kicked suspiciously high, just to be sure — launched the Aggies (weirdly enough, a touchdown underdog) to the win. Moments before that, the Irish broke a tied game on running back Jeremiah Love’s 12-yard run only for holder Tyler Buchner (yes, the former quarterback) to drop a perfectly snapped ball. It bounced off his hands not unlike a basketball bangs off the top of the backboard.

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Everyone afterward made sure to get a message across to the media in the room: This isn’t one guy’s fault.

“The focus needs to be on how to improve. Not whose fault it is or who to blame,” Freeman said.

“I can point the finger at myself,” Love said. “Hey, I could have done this. Don’t point fingers.”

Love is the last one who should be pointing fingers at himself. He carried the ball 23 times for 94 yards, had four more catches for 53, scored two touchdowns and, in many ways, figuratively put the team on that large back of his on that final drive. Tied at 34 in a back-and-forth scoring frenzy of a game, Love converted a third down with a 6-yard run and then a fourth-and-1 with another 6-yard run, this one on a direct snap.

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Don’t blame him.

The finger-pointing should turn toward the Notre Dame defense, which allowed a whopping 18 “explosive plays” — usually measured as rushes of at least 10 yards and passes of at least 15.

Texas A&M’s receivers are a talented bunch, yes, most of all Mario Craver, the 5-9, 165-pound Mississippi State transfer who many in the college football world had never heard of before Saturday. Consider that changed. He had 207 yards, including a spinning, tackle-breaking 86-yard touchdown in the first quarter.

Reed, the shifty A&M QB, completed 17 passes for 360 yards — a 21.2-yard average per completion. It’s a fairly remarkable stat if you didn’t watch the game, when Aggies wideouts ran free and completely open for most of the night (in fact, Reed missed at least three more wide-open deep balls).

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Sure, Notre Dame’s team from last year lost a ton: top-two tacklers, their sack leader and three starting defensive backs, including All-American Xavier Watts. Defensive coordinator Al Golden fled for the NFL and the Irish replaced him with Chris Ash, a longtime coordinator at a variety of stops.

Notre Dame’s front created very little pressure and its back end left receivers sometimes 2-3 yards open. What happened?

“It’s not good enough,” Freeman said before telling reporters that he’ll be back with a deeper report on Monday after he watched a replay of the game.

But let’s be honest, this wasn’t an easy start to the year. Notre Dame, with a first-year starting quarterback in CJ Carr, could have kicked things off like so many other programs, with tune-up, preseason style matchups against lower-resource programs (have you seen Penn State’s first three games)?

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Instead, here they were, in the midst of a heavyweight fight against an SEC championship challenger with a budget and boosters richer than anyone in this sport, perhaps.

After Notre Dame scored with 2:53 left, this seemed destined to be a feel-good story for the Irish, a rousing win at home to right the wrong in Miami two weeks ago, their Heisman Trophy candidate of a running back — lost in that game against the Hurricanes — back in the spotlight here. They force-fed Love, rightfully so. He made one-handed grabs, hurdled tacklers and bullied through others.

The Jumbotron at Notre Dame stadium serenaded the crowd with appropriately selected tunes relating to the running back’s last name. Frank Sinatra’s “L.O.V.E.,” Haddaway’s “What is Love?” and then, after he strode into the end zone from 12 yards out, Huey Lewis and the News came thundering through the speakers: The Power of Love.

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But moments later, after the Aggies marched 74 yards on 13 plays in less than two-and-a-half minutes, after Reed rolled to his left and found his tight end, Notre Dame, that national runner-up, the big brand playing here at home, fell to 0-2.

Said Love: “It hurts. Who wants to start a season off 0-2?”