Miami ? The message is getting old for fifth-ranked Louisville.

Nearly every day during the past year, coach Bobby Petrino relentlessly has hit the Cardinals with the same refrain – finish.

Finish practice. Finish the play. Finish the tackle. Finish the game.

It’s a motto borne of late-second frustrations and meltdowns that have cost the program in years past.

“We need to show that we can win the big game and just keep going,” Petrino said.

And while the mantra has grown tiresome to the Cardinals (11-1), they know there’s only one way to silence their coaches: finish off the best season in school history with a victory over No. 15 Wake Forest (11-2) in the Orange Bowl tonight.

“It’s been drilled into our head,” center Eric Wood said. “We don’t even really have to talk about it anymore. Now it’s time to finish the season and we have an opportunity to finish the season better than any Louisville team ever has.”

The stage has never been bigger for either program. The Cardinals see their first Bowl Championship Series appearance as the final step in a process that began nearly a decade ago, when Petrino and then-coach John L. Smith set about creating an offense designed to be the nation’s best at a school where basketball has long been king.

There’s still work to be done, but the Cardinals know a victory could give them a more permanent seat at college football’s head table. A win would guarantee Louisville its highest final ranking in its history and continue the march toward Petrino’s ultimate goal: a spot in the BCS title game.

The Demon Deacons, meanwhile, will try to validate their remarkable turnaround season. Wake Forest stormed to the top of the Atlantic Coast Conference behind an opportunistic defense and affable coach Jim Grobe, who has done his best to make his players believe the one of the nation’s smallest schools could hold its own with the sport’s elite.

“We felt we could do this, but nobody else did,” defensive tackle Jamil Smith said. “So it was just great to prove people wrong.”