Gut Reaction, Five Hours Later

Remember last summer, when there was all the talk of Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals, and you thought to yourself "no way, that's too many"--not because there was some apparent problem with Phelps, just because nobody wins eight gold medals with a true freshman quarterback (spoiler alert: it's an analogy). And then he goes and wins some, and you're like "oh, this dude is pretty good, but nobody wins eight gold medals." And then came the 100-meter butterfly, where he was losing the whole time, and you lean over to your friend and say "told you--dude just can't do it." Then out of nowhere, Phelps surges, slaps the wall, wins by 1/100 of a second, and you're not really sure what you saw.

I'm not saying that USC is now about to go win 8 Pac-10 gold touchdown medals (not a thing), just that coming into this game, there was no reason to expect Barkley to be able to do anything considering it was his first collegiate road game in a notoriously hostile stadium against a completely respectable team. And during most of the game, you leaned over to your friend and said "well, I guess we shouldn't have expected too much." Then out of nowhere Barkley put something together, and you were just glad to see it.

So maybe in January we can look back on this and think, well that was USC's 100-meter butterfly, when we knew this was legit. Or maybe we'll look back on the game before USC lost to Washington. Ha, jokes! But seriously, Nick Holt is for realsies.

Okay, I'm sure we'll have more to say about this later, but until then, it was a fun night. And by fun I mean miserable for like 55 minutes of play and then whew.