The greatest rivalry

Rivalries ebb and flow. A few years ago, the September tilt between Florida State and Miami was virtually the National Championship Semi-final; these days, it's a 13-10 offense-free shovathon in which the winner is as disgraced as the loser. In the decade before Bob Stoops and Mack Brown, the Oklahoma-Texas game was irrelevant, then a one-sided Sooner laugher. Since last year, it's become The Testing Ground for Texas.

And so it is with Notre Dame-USC. The game had a special meaning for me long before I entered USC (I did in fact grow up rooting for Notre Dame). The first football game I ever read about in Sports Illustrated was of the 1974 contest, coincidentally the most famous game in the rivalry's history. This was the game, everyone remembers, where USC trailed 24-0 in the second quarter and 24-6 at halftime, whereupon Anthony Davis returned the second-half kickoff for a touchdown, and the Trojans were off to scoring 55 unanswered points for a final score of 55-24.

55-24. As Frank Deford once wrote, it is not often people remember football scores. Last year's Super Bowl? 21-10, Pittsburgh, though it took you a second. The Notre Dame-USC game had been going on for decades, there had been Gifford and Garrett and OJ and Lujack and Huarte and Hornung, but this was the fulcrum. This was the game that introduced American to Traveller, the great white horse that encircled the field after every Trojan score. This was the game that send Notre Dame's Ara Parsegian into retirement--supposedly, in part because he never wanted to look at that damned horse ever again. This game was one that signaled one of the great period in the school's rivalry, one that featured the arrival of Joe Montana (1977), the Komeback Kid Thwarted (1978), and Win One for the Fat Man (the 1982 game that was also the last of John Robinson first tenure). What began in 1983 and lasted for over a decade was one of Notre Dame hegemony, which roughly coincided with USC's, then Notre Dame's, slide into mediocrity. The few times the schools met for large stakes, the game was almost always a laugher--in 1988, when No. 1 Notre Dame met No. 2 USC, the Irish won a 27-10 laugher. Even when USC was very good, and during the Rodney Peete years they were, Notre Dame could not be beat; as a starter, Peete was 0-3 against the Irish, including the '88 debacle. In 1996, when USC finally broke through and ended 13 years of 0-12-1 frustration with an overtime win (this was the year of the $8 million-dollar missed extra point, if you remember), it did not escape anyone's attention that the victory merely salvaged a 6-6 Trojan campaign. What followed was a half-decade of futility on both sides. Notre Dame struggled under Bob Davie, while the Trojans, who learned all the wrong lessons from Keyshawn Johnson, became worse than bad; they became punk-ass.

For all intents and purposes, the modern Irish-Trojan rivalry returned to its importance in 2002, when, for the first time in ages, the both teams entered the game in the top ten, with a BCS game on the line. This was the game remembered for Ty Willingham's defensive schemes being totally exposed by Norm Chow and Carson Palmer, or as the game that won the Heisman Trophy for Palmer. Taking the longer view, this was the game that signaled that Irish-Trojans once again mattered.

It mattered a great deal more last year, when USC (thanks to Matt Leinart first finding Dwayne Jarrett in man coverage, then benefiting from a Bush Push a few plays later) squeaked out a win in The Greatest Game Ever Played. It matters still more today, as the two teams take the field for what is (or should be) a worthy companion to last week's Ohio State-Michigan game: in so many words, the national semi-finals.

A old friend from school e-mailed me this week expressing 1) she was sick, physically ill thinking about the game; and 2) that she hates Notre Dame: "Hate is too weak a word."

Which only means one thing heading into today.

Perfection.

Beat the Irish.