Jimmy Lake had us at hello.

He lost us at Montana.

He went past the point of no return against Oregon.

Thus this college football season turned into a precipitous nine-week slide for the charming yet unbridled University of Washington leader that culminated with his mad dash down the sideline on November 6 during the Ducks game — straight into a linebacker’s face and unemployment.

Eight days later on Sunday, the school officially fired Lake for embarrassing the institution with his reckless manhandling of a UW player captured on a live national TV broadcast for all to see. Maybe even more pronounced for the administration, he was let go for not winning nearly enough with the extensive resources he was handed. The news came in a terse four-paragraph release. Defensive coordinator Bob Gregory will continue on as interim coach.

Lake, 44, became the first Husky football head coach to be removed from his job in every manner while a season was in progress. Tyrone Willingham previously was fired by the UW after seven games in 2008 but he was permitted to finish out the schedule with an 0-12 team. Lake’s conduct — in which he ran over people to shove and strike out wildly at freshman walk-on Ruperake Fuavai — was considered far too egregious to be given a reprieve.

Other football coaches have been fired from the UW, Jim Lambright because his program had stagnated in 1998 and the athletic director gave in to donors’ wishes, Rick Neuheisel in 2002 for participating in an office gambling pool, Keith Gilbertson in 2004 for going 1-10 and Willingham for sinking even lower with the school’s only winless season in modern times.

Yet none of them fell out of favor so fast or in such shocking fashion as Lake, an energetic Spokane native who coached in all of 13 Husky games over two seasons because of pandemic limitations in 2020 and his recent one-week suspension. This was the equivalent of a normal regular season plus a bowl game. It wasn’t long at all.

With his termination, Lake becomes the first UW football coach to be fired twice by the school, too. In 2004, he was a first-year, defensive-backs coach for Gilbertson who had to go, along with everyone else, when the team tanked.

Seventeen years later, as this in-house replacement for Chris Petersen, Lake was dismissed once more after serving his suspension, one presumably put in place to enable buyout negotiations to proceed. Lake is owed $10 million for the remaining three years of a five-year deal he signed, which the school is expected to pay to avoid any acrimony while pursuing a replacement coach.