Notre Dame fans are having themselves a blimey good old time in advance of Thursday’s CFP semifinal against Penn State, and well they should.

Quite an accomplishment. Top o’ the mornin’ to ya and, by all means, win one for the Gipper!

But this Irish celebration doesn’t have to be — and shouldn’t be — at Brian Kelly’s expense.

Yes, the Irish are having themselves a field day on social media, mostly making sport of Kelly for abandoning Notre Dame for a supposed better opportunity — if not quite from greener pastures — to make some postseason playoff noise at LSU.

The most popular Internet meme generally has a picture of Kelly in LSU attire, with some sort of caption identifying it as the key to the Notre Dame’s surge into the national limelight.

Well, if that ain’t a hardy ha-ha-ha.

Let them have their fun with a gridiron “Samhain,” which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a rollicking,  Gaelic festival not named St. Patrick’s Day. They are spreading a whole lot of “craic,” — probably while “scuttered” (alcohol-related) — which translates on these shores to “news, fun, gossipy entertainment.”

Probably harmless fun — Nyah-nyah-nah-nyah-nyah. Translation: “Take that, you traitor.”

And, for sure, take nothing away from Marcus Freeman,  Kelly’s successor at Notre Dame, who has the Irish two wins away from their first national championship since 1988. Give him his “wee dote” — due credit — for a job well done.

Whatever the language, however, Kelly is getting a bad rap in this whole deal.

Granted, he kind of set himself up for it. Almost begged for it. When he left Notre Dame he made no bones about the reason. LSU, he said, provided a clearer path to the national championship with a better pipeline to the kind of talent such a venture required.

Blarney, they are now calling it in South Bend, often accompanied by considerable “gaidhlig,” or belly laughing.

They are just coddin’ ya — i.e., “joking” — so don’t go all “acting the maggot,” or acting the fool.

Kelly just has to grin and bear it and keep browsing in that transfer portal to get LSU to where the team he left behind is today.

He is 3-0 in the postseason at LSU, but he’d be the first to tell you that trophies from the Citrus, Reliaguest and Texas Bowls aren’t what he had in mind when he came south.

In fact, what he said after the regular season finale was “I didn’t come down here to go 8-4 — nobody in that (locker) room is happy about 8-4.”

He and the Tigers got it to 9-4 with a convincing win over Baylor in the Texas Bowl, but that’s still well shy of what he has in mind.

Something about “We’re taking receipts, and we’ll see you in the national championship.”

He didn’t offer any estimate on the ETA, but surely a big reason for his move was that the last three LSU head coaches all won national championships. Well, that, and $100 million spread out over 10 years.

Anyway, the fallacy in this Notre Dame taunting is that Freeman is taking Notre Dame into waters uncharted by Kelly’s Irish tenure.

OK, Freeman’s two playoff wins this year are two more than Kelly managed.

But Kelly didn’t have the 12-team playoff when he was there either.

Freeman’s wins over Indiana and Georgia has Notre Dame in the semifinals.

In either of the old formats, the two-team BCS and the four-team playoff, 2024 Notre Dame wouldn’t even be in the playoffs this year.

Kelly was there three times — once in the old BCS (2013) and twice in the CFP (2018 and 2020).

By my reckoning, in a 12-team playoff Kelly’s Notre Dame teams would also have made the current CFP format two other times, in 2015 and 2021 — the latter of which might have kept him from leaving for LSU since he’d have had a playoff game to host as the No. 5 seed.

The real knock on postseason Kelly — and probably the source of his frustration — was that he got routed in all three appearances.

Two were against SEC teams and the other, Clemson, was often accused of being an SEC team in ACC clothing.

But none were pretty — a 42-14 loss to Alabama in the BCS following the 2013 season, and CFP semifinal losses of 30-3 to Clemson in 2018 and 31-14 to Alabama in 2020.

We’ll never know what Kelly might have done if, like this season, he’d had a tune-up playoff game or two before getting to semifinals.

But, playing by the rules of the day, he’s twice been where Notre Dame is now and once to the championship game that the Irish are still a game shy from.

Now, if Notre Dame beats Penn State Thursday, that’s a different story. Then the Irish can send Kelly all the magadhs (taunts) they want.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. You can email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com