No player on Oregon's current team knows who the heck Casey Paus is. No Duck remembers the names "Cody Pickett" and "Keith Gilbertson." Heck, how many know that Jason Fife and Kellen Clemens once uncomfortably shared the Ducks quarterback job during an age when Oregon getting good play behind center wasn't perceived as a constitutional right?

The aforementioned are meaningful names from the 2003 Oregon-Washington game.

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, Norah Jones won five Grammy Awards, Johnny Depp earned a surprise Oscar nomination for "Pirates of the Caribbean," and Washington stomped Oregon 42-10 in frenzied Husky Stadium, with Paus coming off the bench to replace a concussed Pickett to give Gilbertson one of his best wins during a tumultuous and ultimately doomed tenure.

That was the last time Washington beat Oregon.

Oregon's annual game with Washington was once the Pac-10's most bitter rivalry. It just felt different. Most college football rivalries have a romance to the dislike between the programs. There's a divided city or state and history and traditions and blah blah blah. Those rivalries can be set to poetry. Oregon-Washington, though, was simple prosaic invective. It didn't gain traction as a national curiosity because it couldn't spare any bile for self-promotion.

Chris Peterson's rebuilding job at Washington is moving forward, and a win over Oregon would be a nice step. Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

Only it used to be Washington's game with Oregon, and the Huskies used to be the rich and powerful national power, the Ducks the sometimes scrappy regional afterthought.

For the past 11 seasons, however, the Ducks not only beat the Huskies, they crushed them. Or did they bludgeon them? Whatever. They won every game by at least 17 points, which means Washington fans often were slinking away, planning whatever form of self-medication they preferred before the fourth quarter began.

During that streak, Oregon went 10-0-1 against the spread, even though it was favored in every game.

Yet when the Ducks make their trip northwest to Seattle on Saturday, it is the Huskies who are the favorites. It is the Huskies coming off an impressive road win over preseason Pac-12 favorite USC. It is the Huskies who appear to be moving up with optimism.

And Oregon? The Ducks are 1-2 in the Pac-12 and 3-3 overall. The Ducks are coming off an overtime loss at home to Washington State, which lost its opener to Portland State, an FCS team. The Ducks are moving forward with a sense of foreboding, a sense that gravity is finally again affecting their program.

Are the tectonic plates of college football in the Northwest shifting? Is Washington -- finally -- on the rise and Oregon, the nation's fourth winningest program over the past decade, faltering? Perhaps.

Oregon's climb over Washington in the regional and national pecking order was one of the most dramatic and long-lasting reversals of fortune in a rivalry in college football history. While Oregon experienced its greatest run of success, the Huskies went from national champions in 1991 and national title contenders in 2000 to five losing seasons that bottomed out at 0-12 in 2008.

Even as the Huskies regained respectability under Steve Sarkisian, Oregon provided the ultimate insult: It seemingly moved on. While older fans who grew up hating the Huskies retained their ill will, the younger ones seemed to embrace Chip Kelly's credo of "nameless, faceless opponents," which pretty much smirked at the whole idea of rivalry games. Older Oregon fans cringed when Kelly said Sarkisian was one of his better friends in coaching, while younger fans didn't know who Steve Sarkisian was until it was clarified that he was "Seven-Win Sark."

Even third-year Oregon coach Mark Helfrich, who grew up as an Oregon fan hating Washington, has mostly shrugged off the notion of there being anything special about this rivalry beyond a superficial fan level.

In 2003, the Huskies overcame a 10-7 halftime deficit and rolled behind their backup QB with 35 unanswered points. The game got chippy at the end because Oregon safety Keith Lewis had predicted during the week that the Ducks would dance on the "W" at midfield as payback for the Huskies' over-the-top 30-minute celebration after a 42-14 win the previous season in Eugene.

The fun didn't last long for Washington. It lost its next two games, including an epic 54-7 humiliation at California. After notching an upset win in the Apple Cup over No. 8 Washington State, the Huskies would go on to go 3-19 over the next two seasons.

Washington isn't good yet. All it's really accomplished this season is a road upset at USC, and it's pretty clear Sarkisian and the Trojans have a lot of issues. Yet there are strong hints that Chris Petersen's rebuilding job is inching forward.

With Oregon, it might be premature for absolute doom and gloom. Even the most dynastic programs have down years.

Yet if Washington finally ends its run of abject futility in its series with Oregon on Saturday, it will be difficult not to view the Northwest differently. At the very least, a great rivalry might regain its bitterness.