Irish Are Hovering to Get a 10-Count : Notre Dame: The thrill of victory hasn’t waned for its fans despite a nine-game winning streak against the Trojans.

The rallying cries are a peculiar mixture of the spiritual and secular, and they flow easily off the tongue of Marci Moran, Notre Dame ’92.

“Seven, we’re going for Heaven:”

Notre Dame 28, USC 24.

“Eight is great:”

Notre Dame 10, USC 6.

“Nine is divine:”

Notre Dame 24, USC 20.

And this year:

“Decade of Dominance.”

The slogans are Irish alumni-driven, and the annual creation process is one they would happily continue forever. They celebrate the Streak: nine consecutive victories over USC. And they mark a rivalry that has withstood the generations of football players and coaches who play their brief roles and then join the sloganists.

“It’s a fun rivalry,” says Moran, who lives in Fullerton and was a trainer with the football team during her undergraduate days at South Bend.

“You ask the students and they would say the big rivalry is with Miami, even though we don’t play them anymore. Or some might say it’s with Michigan, because it’s in the neighborhood. You know, for king of the Midwest.”

But Miami was a transient thing and ended virtually at birth of too much energy.

“It was for national bragging rights,” says Pat Terrell, Notre Dame ’90 and Ram safety.

And Michigan is regional and sporadic, with long breaks. The first meeting was in 1887, but there have been only 24 games since.

Notre Dame-USC is national and enduring, broken only by World War II since the first game, in 1926.

“It’s more of a classy rivalry,” Terrell says. “Football players are football players, and there’s always going to be some talk back and forth on the field. But it’s not trash talk.”

And it remains special, whether the players listen to Sinatra and Goodman, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Rolling Stones or to the rap that seems to pound in every football locker room in the land.

“The coaches keep it traditional,” says Todd Lyght, Ram cornerback and Notre Dame ’91.

“I can see where nowadays, players might not appreciate tradition,” Terrell says. “But Lou Holtz won’t let you forget it.”

It’s a conscious process by the Notre Dame coach.

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“You don’t go in in September and start thinking about the SC game,” Terrell says. “Notre Dame’s schedule isn’t such that you can look past a Michigan to play a Michigan State. You just can’t look forward.”

And then it’s SC week.

“I remember Lou Holtz taking us into the auditorium the Sunday or Monday before the game for the team meeting,” Terrell says. “We would have them before every game, but this time, instead of talking about John Doe, the next team’s star running back or Heisman Trophy candidate, he talked about Knute Rockne and, I guess, about his coming to California and his wife liked California, or something. It becomes a much bigger deal in every way.”

And it builds through the week of preparation.

“I don’t know if Holtz is still doing it, but by the end of the week, the SC fight song is your least favorite song,” Terrell says. “He put it on speakers out at practice and played it the whole 2 hours and 15 minutes, over and over again. It’s to put atmosphere in the week--to build it.”

The indoctrination does strange things to players, making some forget their parts and remember the whole. The memories are personal and more intense than those from other games, and they are more emotional than physical.

“I remember a goal-line stand in the ’88 game,” Lyght says. “It was, like, first and goal on the two and we shut them down.” That was the year the No. 1 Irish beat No. 2 USC, 27-10, and won a national championship.

Lyght adds that he thinks he might have been in on one of the tackles.

And also of that game:

“I remember so vividly that, even though it was in Southern California, I was so proud of our school,” Terrell says. “We ran out of the tunnel at the Coliseum, and there must have been 100,000 people there. And the majority of them looked like they were wearing green.

“I was so fired up.”

And his play?

“I think I was in on 11 tackles. I don’t know. I guess I did my job.”

The memories linger, and their form is constant.

“In the ’64 game, we were up, 17-0, at halftime,” says Jack Snow, Ram broadcaster and Notre Dame ’65. “In the fourth quarter, it was third and goal on the one and we scored a touchdown (by Joe Kantor). Then, off on the far right side, there was a flag. It was late, after the play was over. They said our left tackle was holding.

“If you watched the film the next week, the left tackle (Bob Meeker) missed the block completely on the play. He graded out at zero on the block. But it was third and 16, and we didn’t score.”

And the Trojans came back and won, 20-17, when Craig Fertig passed 15 yards to Rod Sherman for a touchdown with 1:33 to play. Fertig is one of Snow’s best friends.

“I play in his golf tournament,” Snow says and laughs. “He never lets me forget it.”

Snow’s memory is of a play in which his involvement was negligible. He does not mention that he caught 10 passes for 158 yards from Fullerton quarterback John Huarte, that season’s Heisman Trophy winner, during the game. Or that one of the passes covered 21 yards for the game’s first touchdown.

For Snow, the rivalry remains personal and the feeling familial.

“The Sunday morning before the game, we would go to Mass, sign the cross and say, ‘Let’s see, how do we beat the Trojans?’ ” he says.

He had gone to Long Beach St. Anthony High, which helped steer him toward South Bend. “I grew up with the SC-Notre Dame mystique,” he says.

“Many of my friends and some of the family went to SC. But I remember watching Notre Dame beat Oklahoma, 7-0, and stop that long winning streak (Bud Wilkinson’s 47 games, ending in 1957). And the Immaculate Heart nuns in high school, and I guess the Franciscan nuns in elementary school, drummed it into us.”

When it was time to choose a college, it was between Notre Dame and SC.

“I knew (Trojan Coach) John McKay well and liked him,” Snow says. “And I had friends going there.

“But instead of going to SC, with its Catholic coach, McKay, I went to Notre Dame and ended up playing for a Presbyterian (in Snow’s senior year, Ara Parseghian).”

The memories linger of that 1964 game, in which Notre Dame came in with a 9-0 record and went home 9-1.

“After the game, I walked off with Paul Johnson, the SC center, and Homer Williams, the fullback,” Snow says. “I had played with both of them at St. Anthony’s.”

The low was replaced by a high two days later.

“We flew back to South Bend on Monday and there was a line of Notre Dame people from the airport to the campus,” Snow says.

All was forgiven by a student body that sets such store that “bedsheet signs hang out the window of dormitories all week of the game,” says Tim Brown, Raider wide receiver and Notre Dame ’88.

In Southern California, allegiance takes extreme forms.

“We’re a house divided this week,” says Marydele Clogherty, who spent her young years in Chicago with cousins who went to South Bend.

She is the office secretary of the Notre Dame club of Los Angeles, but she has season tickets to the USC games and a son and a daughter went to USC.

“This week, they hate me,” she says, laughing and adding, “well, it’s a friendly rivalry.”

And Snow tells the story of the wedding of his daughter, Michelle, to Ron Peters, then a minor league ballplayer and now coach at Chapman College.

“Because he was playing ball, she said they had to have their wedding in November,” Snow says. “I said, ‘OK.’ And she says, ‘Well, Dad, it has to be a specific week in November.’

“And I said, ‘OK.’

“And she says, ‘Well, do you know what is happening that week?’

“And I said, ‘Well, that’s the week of the SC-Notre Dame game, isn’t it?’

“And she says, ‘Yes. Is that OK?’

“And I told her, ‘Well, you only have one day like that in your life, and they play the game every year,’ ” Snow says. “But you can bet there were several big-screen TVs at the reception.”

So, tradition will out in Notre Dame, where it is inescapable, even among some of the hardest cases. And it grows with every chapter of an ongoing history book.

“I think it might have been even bigger when I went to Notre Dame because we didn’t win all that many games and beating SC made our season,” says Brown, who played in Nos. 2-5 of the Streak and won the Heisman Trophy in 1987.

“(Coach Gerry) Faust would start showing us old films of the first Notre Dame-SC game or something, and some film about an SC back fumbling before he crossed the goal line (Michael Harper in the 1982 game), and it was ‘Notre Dame zero, SC seven, officials seven.’

“But it means more to me now than when I was there. When I was there, I just wanted to play football and get my books. I didn’t care about Rockne or the Four Horsemen or any of that.”

But his appreciation of the rivalry grows with each passing year.

“I like to talk the SC-Notre Dame talk,” he says, laughing. “I have a bet with Riki Ellison (former Trojan linebacker and now a Raider). Whoever wins, the other has to wear the winner’s school hat for a week.”

Then he gets serious.

“It’s not a big game, it’s a huge game,” he says. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself to convince myself I was a part of all that.”