At its best, Stanford is a team feared throughout the Pac-12 Conference, mixing finesse with constructive violence and preserving a modern-day reputation launched in the Jim Harbaugh years. This hasn’t been a vintage season by any means, but Washington learned on Friday night that reports of a Cardinal malaise could not be taken seriously.

The game started late, there was a regrettable television snafu, and at times the referees seemed intent on tossing flags on every play. None of that mattered to coach David Shaw’s team after a vital 30-22 victory over the ninth-ranked Huskies at Stanford Stadium.

A loss would have effectively crushed the season, leaving Stanford with an attractive finishing schedule — the Big Game and Notre Dame, both at home — but no hope to compete in the Pac-12 championship game. Now that remains a distinct possibility, and at the very least, the pride of Shaw’s program was convincingly restored.

All things considered, this makes a very short list of Shaw’s biggest wins. His six previous seasons have been characterized by elite-level records and big-time bowl appearances. Fading out of the Pac-12 picture this early — after being ranked 15th in the nation at the start of the season — would leave a bitter taste for months to come.

Last year, even with the great Christian McCaffrey, the Cardinal were blown out by the Huskies 44-6 in Seattle. The shift to Palo Alto marked a radical change of fortunes, and by game’s end there was little doubt about the superior team.

Jake Browning, the Huskies’ renowned quarterback, did no significant damage. Dante Pettis, the finest kick returner in the land, never got a chance to shine. Washington gave up more big plays than it had surrendered in any game this season.

The stars of this show were Stanford quarterback K.J. Costello, leading target JJ Arcega-Whiteside (five catches, 130 yards) and Heisman Trophy candidate Bryce Love, who played through a troublesome ankle injury and rushed for 166 yards with three touchdowns, including the 9-yard sprint that gave Stanford a 30-14 lead early in the fourth quarter.

This was a game that deserved proper television exposure, and that was clear over the summer, when both teams loomed as contenders for the Pac-12 title. What it got was a travesty. That’s nothing new in the Pac-12, but this game represented everything wrong with the conference’s television deal.

For one thing, Friday night. It’s like a practical joke of some kind. Friday nights are for high school ball, when everything about the scene feels right. It’s a very tired act in the Pac-12 and particularly at Stanford, where night games pile up like unwanted junk mail and longtime fans can’t hide their exasperation.

(Including all nights of the week, Stanford played seven night games in a 12-game schedule in 2015. Cal had the same predicament last year.)

This nocturnal episode, however, produced a special brand of awful. The 7:30 start was delayed until 7:45 because the network in question, FoxSports1, was showing NASCAR’s World Truck Series from Phoenix. If fans took the time to read the small-print scroll at the bottom of the screen, they learned the game was being farmed out to FoxSports2 — a channel not readily available to many subscribers, hotel guests or even sports-bar patrons in some locales.

Those trucks were really rolling, sports fans. On and on they spun, crashed and tumbled. Fox Sports wasn’t about to abandon that gaudy spectacle. In a truly amazing development, FS1 viewers didn’t get a glimpse of Stanford-Washington action until the Cardinal scored its first touchdown — at the start of the second quarter!

So many coaches, players and fans have complained about Pac-12 scheduling, you’d think a major overhaul would be forthcoming. No chance. The contract is hardbound and runs through June 2024. The Pac-12 landed a financial windfall from the ESPN and Fox networks to show night games, and the money-hungry conference schools signed off on the deal.

Commissioner Larry Scott, of course, is no help at all. “We’ve found that night games rate better than the day games,” he said recently. Well, of course they do. There’s no competition. Daytime on Saturday means going head-to-head with the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, Notre Dame — you name it. But none of those schools seem to mind. They’d be embarrassed to stage an important game — hell, any game — on a Friday night.

So here we had the Cardinal and Huskies, with so much at stake, finishing up at a tidy 2:05 a.m. East Coast time. Thousands of fans had departed well before then, seeing no point in soaking up the thrill of victory. That was left to the Stanford players in a game that will resonate, with emphasis, in the coming weeks.

Bruce Jenkins is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: bjenkins@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1