The confetti was still cascading at the end of January’s College Football Playoff championship game when what looms as the most intriguing question of the 2018 preseason nationally was breathlessly posed:

Who will emerge as national champion Alabama’s starting quarterback for this season, Tua Tagovailoa or Jalen Hurts?

Thanks to the off-the-bench, second-half heroics in the championship game and game-winning touchdown pass by Saint Louis School graduate Tagovailoa, the interest in the position has gone far beyond the Heart of Dixie state lines and the Southeastern Conference to a compelling drama that will be played out on a national stage.

We are reminded of that this week because no sooner had the Crimson Tide announced the schedule of its much-anticipated spring practice — March 20-April 21— than ESPN declared it would not only be carrying the spring game live but doing it in full force. I mean, sideline reporters for a spring game?

That it is scheduled to be the only open scrimmage of the spring merely fires up the interest in the showdown of sophomore-to-be Tagovailoa, the cool-handed difference in the CFP, and junior-to-be Hurts, who is 25-2 as a starter.

Tagovailoa — the star of a 2017 recruiting class that also included receivers DeVonta Smith, Henry Ruggs III and Jerry Jeudy, as well as running back Najee Harris and offensive lineman Alex Leatherwood — vs. Hurts, who guided the Crimson Tide to back-to-back CFP championship games but was unable to win either.

Let the hype begin for what al.com calls the “Alabama quarterback competition to end them all.”

Rarely has any university been blessed with two such talents for a quarterback job that only one can win.

Maybe.

Alabama coach Nick Saban, attempting to lower some of the volume and keep the eventual runner-up from booking a transfer, suggested he might even play two this season. “The most important thing is to play the best guy and if both guys can play winning football, it is not out of the question that we’ll find a role for both guys in fairness to both guys,” Saban told ESPN.com.

Clearly whoever became the odd man out would have no shortage of red carpet opportunities elsewhere.

Since neither player has taken a redshirt year and would have at least two seasons to play elsewhere after redshirting, they are not without options.

Former Alabama offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin had suggested as much in an interview on “The Dan Patrick Show” after the CFP: “If this second half doesn’t flip like this, and Alabama is moving the ball and doesn’t change (quarterbacks), people who really know what’s going on would tell you that Tua was leaving,” Kiffin said.

Kiffin, who is now head coach at Florida Atlantic, said it was “because Tua thought that he should be the starting quarterback and had outperformed (Hurts) in practice, and (Saban) never gave him an opportunity.”

Another wrinkle is that Hurts, the 2016 SEC offensive player of the year, could find a home at another position at Alabama, if it came to that.

Perhaps with that in mind, Alabama, which did not recruit an incoming freshman quarterback for the first time since 2004, is adding Gardner Minshew, a graduate transfer from East Carolina, as a one-year insurance policy in the summer.

The spotlight that found the quarterback position in the CFP, it turns out, shines bright even in the spring.