You had to be there. You had to see USC’s losses last season to understand.

Yes, you can read the scores of four of the Trojan football team’s five losses in 2024 – 27-24, 24-17, 33-30, 29-28 – and think they were, in fact, One Play Away™, as Coach Lincoln Riley would often say.

But in the same way that some games are closer than the score indicates, some games don’t feel as close as the final score would lead you to believe.

Not all seven-game series are created equal, right? You don’t earn plaudits for having built a 3-1 lead and blown it.

And you can’t really feel good about yourself if you led Minnesota late in the third quarter , but burned through all your timeouts and threw a late interception to lose. Or if you led 20-6 at halftime at home against Penn State before losing

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