Thank you @brendan! That was it!!
I cannot tell you how many days I have searched and experimented to get past this (even
tried systemd-networkd to no avail).
One small thing, CentOS Stream 9 does give me the "SysV service
'/etc/rc.d/init.d/network' lacks a native systemd unit file." every time the
service is restarted. Do you know where I can find an equivalent to drop in and eliminate
that warning? It looks like it is supposed to be generating one, but that apparently does
not work.
Regardless, thank you again.
- Jordan.