SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Students spilled onto the field at a sold-out Notre Dame Stadium ten years ago this Thursday, celebrating ninth-ranked Notre Dame’s 31-28 victory over two-time defending national champion and bitter rival USC.

First-year Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis raised his arms triumphantly as he walked toward midfield with the rest of his team right behind him. Notre Dame linebacker Corey Mays, whose hit dislodged the football from USC quarterback Matt Leinart by the goal line, watched the clock tick to zero.

And for about 30 seconds, the senior linebacker believed Notre Dame snapped the USC dynasty’s 27-game winning streak.

“I saw (Matt Leinart) taking off, and I just lowered my shoulder and helmet, trying to run through him,” Mays recalls a decade later. “We get up and I see the time ticking off the scoreboard, and to me the game is over. So I celebrate for at least 30-45 seconds. I know what it’s like to win the game at least.”

The joy of winning didn’t fully set in, though. The referees huddled amidst the chaos and put seven seconds back on the clock—it should have stopped when the ball was fumbled out of bounds. The ball was spotted at the 1-yard line, and USC had time to run one more play. The Irish were still ahead, 31-28.

Leinart took the snap and lunged forward. He was stopped on the initial surge, but running back Reggie Bush rushed forward and pushed Leinart into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown. The “Bush Push” game, as it became known, featured one of the most famous endings—or infamous, depending on whom you ask—of a college football game in recent history. Members of both teams still have conflicting opinions about the controversial ending and dramatic finish.

What neither side disputes, though, is that the four-hour affair that took place on Oct. 15, 2005, is one of the most memorable college football games in recent history.

“It was like you could write that in a movie, and it’s one of those movies where people are like, ‘That was a great movie,’” says USC wide receiver Dwayne Jarrett, whose 61-yard reception on fourth-and-9 late in the fourth quarter kept USC’s final scoring drive alive. “That was a great ending, because it had so many different scenarios and so many plots and then at the end of the game, with Matt running and fumbling the ball. You couldn’t even script that.”

Former players, coaches, television producers, broadcasters, sportswriters and sports information directors revisit the elation, thrill and heartbreak a decade later to tell the story of what happened at Notre Dame Stadium on that October afternoon.

GAME WEEK

Ninth-ranked Notre Dame had a bye week prior to the Oct. 15 matchup with No. 1 and undefeated USC. By the time the Trojans arrive on campus Friday afternoon for their walk-through, the storm that began brewing Monday was nearing its climax.

BRADY QUINN (Notre Dame quarterback): The game just had a different feel than any other game in my time at Notre Dame ever had. The buildup to that game was so much more intense than anything else we’d experienced. I still remember coming off the field on a Wednesday, and there were all these people there on campus trying to get autographs, trying to hound us.

DWAYNE JARRETT (USC wide receiver): It was a buildup like a national championship game almost.

LEE FITTING (ESPN College GameDay producer): For those 48, 72 hours we were there it was bonkers. It’s not often that a campus is off the hook Friday morning and Friday afternoon…they usually wait until Saturday. But on Friday it was nuts, and Saturday morning it was crazy. It was one of our all-time great scenes.

MATT LEINART (USC quarterback): We were on our quest for three in a row, and they wanted to take us down. That year more than ever I remember them just, a different feeling at Notre Dame when we got there, the day before the game it was just. Normally when we played them we thought, all right, it’s Notre Dame, we’re going to crush them. That game, it just had a different feeling to it.

FRIDAY

TIM TESSALONE (USC sports information director): We had a walk-through at the stadium and the buses pulled up and we came around the corner and there were, gosh, it looked like thousands of Notre Dame fans waiting at the entrance—the player entrance by the tunnel. Normally the walk-through is a pretty quiet deal, and this turned into a huge hype session for us and for the fans. The team was trying to get from our buses through that driveway area, that patio area and into the stadium and into our locker room. It was friggin’ wild. I’ve never seen a scene like that before or since.

LEINART: I’ll tell you what, there must have been a thousand people, whatever it was, crowding our buses as we were coming in. It was fun. It was like, ‘Wow, this doesn’t happen at Notre Dame. These fans aren’t like this.’ I think they were rocking our bus. They were talking smack to us.

JARRETT: They were trying to get us shaken up. I think they were trying to intimidate us. Of course it didn’t work, but it was a nice try on their part.

Notre Dame’s pep rally was held in the stadium for the fourth time ever later that evening. Two of the previous rallies were attended by more than 30,000 fans, but when the team walked out of the tunnel at roughly 6:30 p.m. local time to greet its fans, an estimated 45,000 were waiting, packed into the west side of the stadium.

CHARLIE WEIS (Notre Dame head coach): We really didn’t know how many people were going to show up and I just remember going in there and saying, ‘My God. If this is the pep rally, imagine what the game is going to be like.’

QUINN: It was a very different atmosphere compared to all the rest that I ever encountered during my time. That was when it all came to fruition, kind of understanding the magnitude of the game.

COREY MAYS: (Notre Dame linebacker): Charlie Weis told me you and Maurice Stovall are going to speak. I was so excited. And then to walk into that stadium and see what seemed like half of the stadium filled up, it was an amazing feeling. We were ready to play that night. I hated to leave that stadium, that atmosphere, to even try and sleep that night before the game.

PREGAME

WEIS: Personally I’ve been in a lot of big games, and in my college coaching career there was no game that felt the same as that one.

JARRETT: That grass was so high that I think that was the highest grass I ever played on in my whole life. It was like they didn’t cut the grass purposely to try and slow us down. It was almost like a forest. That’s how high it was.

BRIAN POLIAN (Notre Dame special teams coordinator): The grass was high. That’s not a lie. There’s some truth to that. But when you have a grass field, you can do that.

The Irish went through warm-ups in their traditional blue home jerseys, but a surprise—green jerseys—awaited the unsuspecting players when they returned to the locker room before kickoff.

WEIS: Very few people knew. Henry [Scroope], our equipment manager, he knew about them. [Associate athletic director for football operations] Chad [Klunder] knew about them. My kid knew about them. But there weren’t very many people that knew about them. The captains got in the know very, very late, but the players didn’t know when they went out to warm up. They had no idea.

MAYS: We were like little kids opening a Christmas gift. To already be so hyped for the game and to already be so confident and knowing we were going to win this game, we were going to get this done. And now we’re going to look good doing it.

QUINN: It’s the loudest roar that I’ve ever heard. Once we entered onto the field, then you could feel it. You could feel the student section become aware of it.

TOM ZBIKOWSKI (Notre Dame safety): It was so loud you couldn’t hear anything. That was probably the second loudest I’d heard that stadium. Buddies of ours were staying on Rockne Drive. They said when we came out of the tunnel they could hear the stadium that far away.

FIRST HALF

ZBIKOWSKI: I don’t think people realize, the first play of that game (for USC) they do an off-tackle lead play. It was me and [Bush] squared up, and if I don’t make that tackle he probably goes 80 yards for a touchdown. We both collide and we both go sideways. That was one of the biggest collisions I’ve ever been involved with in high school, college or pro of any level. People don’t realize the strength and the explosiveness that even though he was only 205 pounds or whatever he weighed, how physically strong he actually was. Not to mention his moves and his speed.

MAYS: (Bush) was everything as advertised, man. I don’t think you could say anything negative about him on that field. I remember one time I saw him. We were deadlocked in the gap and I stepped into the gap. I think by the time I closed my arms he had taken two steps back and was around the corner. I said, ‘Oh my God.’

BRUCE FELDMAN (ESPN The Magazine): My feeling was ND would play them hard on emotion for the first quarter and a half and maybe we’ll see 20-13 or 20-10 at halftime, and then Reggie Bush will bust a punt return and then it will be 38-13 before you know it.

JARRETT: I think the main thing that stood out is they gave us their best shot in the first half. We’re used to teams that they would come out so aggressively because we were the No. 1 team in the nation all those years. We pretty much brought the crowd to the game.

JUSTIN WYATT (USC cornerback): One of the very few times I got scored on in my college career, Samardzija beat me—they had a route that I thought they game-planned for us because we didn’t see it a lot in the film. They ran a stutter-go-comeback, which went about 20 yards. They had a pretty deep comeback. And what Jeff ran on me was actually a stutter-go-comeback and go. I was game planning for the comeback, so I jumped the comeback, didn’t recover and he caught the touchdown.

USC claims a 14-7 lead in the first quarter but Quinn’s touchdown pass to Samardzija ties the score at 14. USC goes three-and-out on its next possession and Zbikowski waits at Notre Dame’s 40-yard line for the ensuing punt.

ZBIKOWSKI: I told my brother the night before that I was going to take my first punt back this game. I had seen them when they played Arizona State. I had seen their returner take one back to the house. Not that I really saw any weakness in any of their punt coverage guys, because they had some stacked guys on that punt team…but it was kind of, I didn’t give a s— who was on the field, who was going to try and tackle me. It was a play in the game I had to make if I wanted to be solidified as the playmaker that I was.

POLIAN: On the film there was a chance for us to clip somebody right in the back, and if we do, the flag’s going to be thrown and we had a walk-on linebacker out there who played it perfectly. He did not put his hands on the USC player. He just kind of set a pick, got in the way and Tommy got out to the edge and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got something.’ Then the thing that sticks out at the end of the return is I want to say maybe two or three people bounced off of him. He was just not going to get tackled.

JOHN WALKER (USC cornerback): You felt the momentum shift. We felt like we had a couple opportunities going down to do something, and we couldn’t execute on third. You knew that if they stayed within one score, it was going to be tricky.

WEIS: The thing is, despite the fact that [Zbikowski] was over 200 pounds, he had some wiggle. If you can get by the first guy or first two guys down there, you have an opportunity to make some hay. I remember as he caught the ball and went up field, before he broke it outside, as soon as he broke through that initial line of guys that were down there you knew that he had a chance of taking it to the house.

Notre Dame goes into halftime with a 21-14 lead.

ZBIKOWSKI: It wasn’t just like it was some bull— little fumblerooski play. It wasn’t like on-side kicks or stupid plays were keeping us in that game. We were physically beating the s— out of them. From head to toe, everyone was playing the way we needed to play. The only problem was they kept gashing us in the run game.

LEINART: We weren’t notorious for it, but we had a handful of games where we start a little slow and keep a team around for a quarter, quarter and a half, maybe into halftime, and then we would explode in the second half. And that’s what we did against Arizona State (two weeks earlier). We were down 21-3 at halftime and we outscored them 35-7 in the second half. Knowing that we could finish games definitely helps. That goes a long way, and that definitely was part of kind of our thought process in that game we had against Notre Dame.

POLIAN: What I was thinking was, ‘We can play with this team. We can win this game.’ I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but there’s always that question: ‘Are we good enough to play with this team?’ They had been on such a role. We were still an unknown at that point. That’s the year that Mark May gets on television the first game of the year and says Pitt’s going to kill us. We’re still a bit of an unknown quantity. But at halftime I thought, ‘OK, we can win this game. I don’t know if we’re gonna, but we’re capable.’

SECOND HALF

Bush scores the only points of the third quarter on a 45-yard touchdown run to tie the game at 21. After Notre Dame kicker D.J. Fitzpatrick puts the Irish ahead on a field goal early in the fourth quarter, Bush scores his third touchdown of the game with 5:09 remaining. Notre Dame starts the next drive from its 13, trailing 28-24.

QUINN: For any quarterback, that’s the position you want to be in. You’ve got five minutes left in the fourth quarter, you get the ball in your hand and I’m thinking in my head, man, we’re going to try and score and go ahead and we’re going to beat the No. 1 team in the country.

JOHN WALKER: I saw Matt Leinart taking a knee on the sideline, which was not very characteristic of him. He’s always so composed, but he was praying in the closing minutes of that game. As long as we can maintain the ball last, it’s going to be our game.

LEINART: The thought of losing never crossed my mind. I always thought we had an opportunity as long as we could get the ball back.

QUINN: Obviously as we continued to work the ball down the field, we had them right where we wanted them. We ended up having a quarterback run diagramed up we worked on earlier in the week. Charlie said to me, ‘This is the play you’re going to run to win the game for us on.’ And sure enough, we call it on the 3- or 4- or 5-yard line, and I was able to stretch my arm out enough across the goal line to get in there for the score and to go ahead.

Quinn’s 5-yard touchdown run with 2:04 remaining gives Notre Dame a 31-28 lead.

POLIAN: The roof about came off on the stadium. I can’t remember if it was a scramble or a called quarterback draw. I just remember the roof coming off the place and my first thought was we’ve got to go cover the next kickoff and give the defense a chance to go win the game.

DARIUS WALKER: (Notre Dame running back): You’d have thought that that was the moment we really won the championship even though the game wasn’t over, because it was a culmination of everything that had happened in the game from being down in the first quarter to being back up at halftime. Then the tie game in the third quarter and to score then, it really was as if everyone else and I think really ourselves as well think we won this game

QUINN: In all honesty, I remember thinking I don’t know if my knee had gone down before the ball had crossed the plane, so I was looking toward the ref for confirmation. We didn’t have instant replay, which might have had an affect on that play…I was probably down short of the goal line, and if that was the case, more time runs off the clock. We’re probably now second-and-goal or third-and-goal from the inch line punching it in for the go-ahead score, which then means less time on the clock for them. Who knows how that plays out down the stretch?

WEIS: The stadium was rocking and rolling. As a coach, you’re a little cynical. All you’re doing is looking at the clock and saying, ‘Let’s get this thing to triple zeroes, here. Let’s get it to all zeroes and get this game over with.’

MAYS: It’s now or never for us to make a statement. We can be known as the defense that beat them. We fully know the implications of beating them and winning out and going to a national championship.

USC takes over at its own 25-yard line. After an incomplete pass on first down, Leinart is sacked for a nine-yard loss.

LEINART: We actually had a good play designed. I remember we were going to hit Reggie out of the backfield and he was going to streak right down the middle of the field. I think one of our linemen got beat on that play. With third-and-20, that’s when we called timeout and at that time our goal was to put ourselves in a fourth down and manageable. I dumped it down to Reggie and he got us 11 yards, which was big.

POLIAN: We tackle him, we’re in fourth-and-9 and you’re thinking, all right, here we go. We’ve got to make one play and they’re going to rip down the goal posts.

DARIUS WALKER: I think if you’d had asked us honestly at that point, 90 percent of us—especially the guys on offense—thought the game was over. So I wasn’t even paying attention on the fourth-and-9 because I thought for sure this thing is over. We have won this thing. It’s time to celebrate.

PAT HADEN (NBC color commentator): It was third-and-long and I remember vividly saying on the air, ‘They can get this back in two chunks.’ They got six or seven yards on third down and then when it came to fourth-and-9, I was surprised at the call. It turned out to be an audible.

LEINART: It was the loudest I had ever experienced at Notre Dame. It’s not a notoriously loud stadium. Once again, the years I played there before it’s just not one of those SEC plays. It’s not like Oregon at Autzen Stadium. But on that night, on that play and that drive, it was as loud as I could ever remember a stadium being. I couldn’t hear myself talk hardly in the huddle.

JARRETT: The first play was actually going to be a draw I believe to catch them off guard, and then you also had an audible and it was called the sluggo. Matt already told me before the commercial break, ‘I’m probably going to throw it, so just be ready.’ He already had in his mind what he was going to do. The defense gave us that man-to-man look that we were looking for. He checked it off, I ran my slant-and-go route and the offensive line did a great job of protecting Matt. He threw the ball perfectly. The rest is history.

On fourth-and-9 with 1:32 remaining, Leinart tosses the pass that sends Notre Dame Stadium from elation to heartbreak. The pass drops under the outstretched arm of Notre Dame cornerback Ambrose Wooden into the hands of Jarrett, who scampers down the sideline to Notre Dame’s 13-yard line where he’s tackled by the junior cornerback.

ZBIKOWSKI: I was rolling to the middle of the field. They had a little three-by-one set with Dwayne Jarrett on their sideline. Ambrose [Wooden] had awesome coverage. They had a picture of it. The ball and where his arm was were like an inch away. I tried to hang backside as long as I could, but I had three receivers on the other side. Knowing what I know now and having that experience that I had playing in the league, playing around some good players, I would have been a little deeper and hung on that backside.

JARRETT: Earlier in the game my helmet came down on my eye suddenly and I was seeing kind of double vision. If you watch that play clearly, nobody would notice it but honestly man, I just concentrated as much as I could when the ball was coming in to me and I caught it. I caught it with one hand actually. I didn’t get two hands on the ball, because Matt timed it perfectly between the defender and my body, and the ball just came right to my hand.

WEIS: To be honest with you, I thought he was going to intercept the pass and end it right there. Then all of a sudden I see the ball and it seemed like it went through him. I went back and looked at the tape afterwards and it actually went underneath his elbow. The ball didn’t go over the top of him. It went underneath his elbows as he was reaching for the ball. The next thing you know they get the ball and they’re running up the left sideline.

LEINART: The throw was lucky, man. It could have gone either way. I just put it in there and Dwayne made a great play and it fell right into him. I could throw that throw again 10 times and it hits the defender’s pinky and bounces away. You just never know.

JARRETT: If that grass wasn’t so high I believe I would have scored on that run. Everything happens for a reason. It was a hell of a play, man. Hell of a throw by Matt.

ZBIKOWSKI: You hear your heart beating and that’s about it. I was ready to kill somebody at that point. But we kept them inbounds. We kept them in check. All we had to do was keep them out of the end zone and we still got a game to be played.

A few plays later on first-and-goal, Leinart rolls to his left and sprints toward the corner of the end zone, where he collides with Mays. The impact of the hit knocks the ball out of bounds before Leinart crosses the goal line.

LEINART: I saw based on the look that I was going to be hot, meaning they were going to bring more defenders than our offensive line could block, so I knew I was going to either have to throw the ball quick, throw it away or drop back and just avoid him and get out of the pocket and make a play. When I look back, I should’ve just jumped over the guy and I would’ve landed in the end zone. But I didn’t, of course, and it went out of bounds.

ZBIKOWSKI: Corey Mays crushes him. Corey Mays blasted him. I was in coverage. We had everything locked down. I see Corey smash him and I see the ball going loose. I see the clock hit zero. The stadium was dark enough by then that the ball was down somewhere, but I couldn’t see where it was. It wasn’t on the field anywhere.

One sideline official signals a touchdown before marking Leinart down at the 1. Time continues to run off the clock, which hits zero. For about 30 seconds, the scoreboard shows Notre Dame 31, USC 28, with no time remaining.

WEIS: Yeah, as a matter of fact I did think the game was over at that point. Everyone stormed the field. When I saw (the referees) huddling there, anytime they huddle and then they start to point back to a certain point back from where the ball was, you know that in that situation that that’s not good. They were saying the ball went out of bounds at a certain spot, so you know that there was going to be more time.

QUINN: Matt Leinart scrambles outside of the pocket and he gets hit and fumbles out of bounds, that clock shouldn’t stop. It should run out, like it did, and unfortunately the refs botched the game. They were thinking that he ran out of bounds, which he didn’t. There never should have even been an opportunity for the Bush Push.

LEINART: That’s the first time kind of where I thought, ‘What’s happening?’ I thought, ‘Wow, we just lost, I just fumbled the game.’ There were so many thoughts going through my head. I was really unclear, but I do specifically remember the ref getting up and the ref waving his hands like the clock is stopped, and there were still five or six seconds on the clock, so they were congregating. So I was like, ‘OK, maybe this isn’t over.’

JARRETT: That was one second of, ‘Woah, did we lose?’ But I saw the ball, I saw where Matt got hit and I had a perfect view of it because I was at the back of the end zone where he was scrambling to. We had some good referees that game and they definitely did a good job.

JOHN WALKER: There were a lot of guys on our sideline, a lot of guys who fell flat on their face. Guys collapsed at the thought of losing. But coach Carroll said, ‘Everybody get off the field. Shut up, calm down and relax. Act like you’ve been here before.’ We were like, ‘We haven’t been here before.’

The referees spot the ball at the 1-yard line and put seven seconds back on the clock. From the sideline, Carroll signals to Leinart to spike the ball.

LEINART: I remember, I kind of told [Ryan] Kalil, my center, Fred [Matua], my guard, and said, ‘Hey dude,’ kind of under my breath, ‘I’m going. I’m going in.’ So they knew. Notre Dame knew. There was no secret there. They knew what I was doing. And I told Reggie. That was the one thing that I asked him, I said ‘Hey, what should I do?’ and he said, ‘Go for it. I got you.’ That’s why Reggie was so quick to be there.

ZBIKOWSKI: I saw the interaction. Pete Carroll was signaling for Matt Leinart to spike it, and I can see Matt’s mannerisms that he is snapping this ball and either handing it off or quarterback sneak. And I figured he was in a little hurry up mode, he was going to tap the center, snap it and try and hit that first gap and dive in for a quarterback sneak.

Leinart takes the snap and tries to leap forward, but his momentum is stopped shy of the goal line. Then he spins to his left, where Bush pushes him into the end zone for the touchdown with three seconds remaining.

ZBIKOWSKI: We had him stopped. They lose the game, not they’re going into overtime and getting extra time—they lose the game if [Bush] doesn’t do that, because he’s stopped. I had hit him. We had a good surge up front. They stalemated. I had hit him, I was trying to grab onto him and he was going backward and rolling to the side, and Reggie snuck him in.

WEIS: I think Reggie did what any good running back would do. We stopped them on the initial charge. He wasn’t in. I’ve been coaching football for a long time and I’ve watched running backs, fullbacks, offensive linemen, tight ends, I’ve seen everyone push guys from behind. Even though it’s illegal, I thought it was a heads up play by him.

QUINN: To be honest with you, I think any running back, any player in that scenario, when Matt made his initial effort, he didn’t get in, and without the effort of Reggie to push him in he doesn’t get in. And the game is over there. So obviously the refs missed that as well. On the last play of the game, you hate to see the game called like that. Notre Dame unfortunately has a history of officials not making the calls their way in those scenarios.

ZBIKOWSKI: That penalty should never be called.

The controversy stems from Section 3, Article 2b of the NCAA rulebook that could have deemed Bush’s push illegal.

LEINART: Brady Quinn and I, we’re coworkers (at Fox Sports), so we always go back and forth, but I think anyone would have done the same thing. It’s no different than a lineman pushing a running back. I think that happened in the NFL the other day, where a running back was one the 1 and a lineman pushed him in and they called it a touchdown…I think it’s just football players playing football, making plays. It’s that simple. You’re trying to get in the end zone.

JARRETT: You would’ve thought we won the national championship in that game. That’s how we felt and that’s how close we came. I tip my hat to Notre Dame, man. They gave us their best shot and they fought us until the end. We were just the better team that day.

LEINART: That game was the most emotional game I’d ever been a part of. I remember kind of having a couple tears. I wasn’t even crying—it was just like I was so emotionally exhausted that guys were just tearing up, man, because it was a special moment that you just know in that time like, ‘Wow, did that just happen?’

FELDMAN: Pete Carroll comes in (for his press conference after Weis) and Pete Carroll said to me, ‘What did (Weis) say?’ And I think Pete Carroll was asking if he questioned the officiating or didn’t give them credit for it. I said (Weis) took the high road and he said it was a great game, and when I said that he said, ‘Oh, OK.’ I think he wondered if he was going to be asked about stuff that he’d have to respond to. It wasn’t like Weis went up there and said the officials screwed us.

JARRETT: (Weis) came in (to the USC locker room afterward). He shook a couple of our players’ hands. He came over and he complimented us on a great job and great game. I think that’s just a great job by him showing his character and how great of a coach he was by doing that. Most coaches don’t come over to the opponent’s locker room and do something like that.

POLIAN: I also remember Charlie telling the team that it was not OK to lose, but how proud he was of their effort and that we were going to take a deep breath and we were going to come back and rip off however many games we had left – I think maybe six. He told the team, ‘We’re going to rip off five or six in a row and we’re going to be in a great bowl game.’ Sure enough, that’s what happened. As a young coach who wanted to be a head coach someday, I was really taken with the way he spoke to the team.

Notre Dame went on to win out in the regular season before falling to Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl. USC runs the table again, but lost to Texas, 41-38, in the Rose Bowl, a game decided by a Vince Young touchdown scored with 26 seconds left. Still, the legacy of the Notre Dame-USC game lives on in college football lore.

PETER VAAS (Notre Dame quarterbacks coach): I think when you watch the game years later, when you can sit back and kind of emotionally observe the intensity of the fans, the enthusiasm of the fans, how crowded the stadium is, and then the number of plays that are made, the number of penalties that occur, and the ups and downs of the emotional part of the game, it’s just a tremendous, tremendous example of what college football is. College football is excitement. College football is a learning process, but yet college football is still the mistakes and the great plays of young, great players.

LEINART: You don’t ever have time to really think about it, especially in sports. You always have to go on to the next one, and it really doesn’t sink in until years after when people are still talking about it and you’re thinking. I mean, look at it. We’re doing a story on it 10 years later and it feels like yesterday. It’s pretty crazy when you think back and when you get older you start to appreciate those types of moments that happened.

QUINN: It was one of the most storied games between two of the most storied programs in college football. There’s no other way to really put it. It’s one of those match-ups and controversial games based on how it ended, with people seeing Reggie Bush push Matt in, and everything that went on with USC that year. The green jerseys, the hype around that, and it being Charlie Weis’ first year. It all adds to the rivalry.

JOHN HEISLER (Notre Dame sports information director): When Charlie was here we had our ups and downs, and even though we went to a couple of BCS games, if you ask our fans over the course of his tenure here, that may well be as memorable a game as there was. Even though we didn’t win – not that we didn’t beat some other good people during those five years, but if there was one game that was the signature game of Charlie’s time here, I would guess a lot of people would say that was it, despite the final score.

FELDMAN: If USC wins that game 38-20, I don’t know if Notre Dame ever would have spent a fortune to owe Charlie Weis so much money. If they blow them out, I wonder if Notre Dame would have agreed to that deal.

WYATT: I do remember walking up the tunnel and one of the staff or coaches yelled, ‘Instant classic!’ You don’t appreciate it at that time as a player. You’re just like, damn, it was a dogfight. You don’t think of the entertainment aspect. But it was probably one of the best games ever in college football.

FITTING: In terms of regular season games and in terms of my dozen years of being around GameDay, it’s up there…you put it up there amongst the Iron Bowl when they were 1 and 2 or 1 and 3. It’s like a couple games in the past dozen years. When you get that rivalry and two top-10 teams and a 27-game winning streak and Charlie Weis at Notre Dame, it was like the perfect storm.

POLIAN: I think unfortunately, I’m on the wrong side of it, but I think it’s one of the iconic games in history. And I don’t know if I recognized that in the moment, but when I came out of the locker room after the game I hugged my wife and gave her a kiss and then I went to my dad (former Indianapolis Colts general manager and team president Bill Polian). And my dad put his arms around me and he said, ‘Listen, this is one of the greatest games in the history of college football and you were lucky enough to be right smack in the middle of it. You didn’t win it, but you’re going to look back on this at the end of your career and be grateful that you had the experience.’ And he’s right.