Hey, it’s Texas-USC week. Remember the last time they played football?

Texas and USC will play football in Los Angeles on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, Fox). The last time they played each other was that time. Unless you’re really young, you remember. And even if you are, there’s a pretty good shot you remember.

A few weeks ago, we polled a bunch of our Twitter followers: What’s the best college football game they’d ever watched? Our readers settled on a list of the 25 most beloved games of this century. No. 1 is the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, featuring Boise State stunning Oklahoma with a Statue of Liberty play.

No. 2 on that list is the 2005 season’s Rose Bowl, which doubled as the BCS National Championship. Texas over USC, 41-38, on Jan. 4, 2006.

Young’s scramble for the game-winning touchdown on a fourth-and-5 in the last minute from the USC 9-yard line is legendary. It was the capper on this stat line:

Young’s 467 yards from scrimmage were a Rose Bowl record until USC’s Sam Darnold got 473 in a similarly bonkers (though not a national title) Rose Bowl in 2017. Nobody after Young had run for 200 yards in the Rose Bowl until an actual running back, Penn State’s Saquon Barkley, got 204 in the Darnold game.

Largely because of this game, Young is on a shortlist of the best college QBs ever.

The headliner was Reggie Bush, who goes down with Young as a co-player of that era in college football. Bush was lightning, and backfield-mate LenDale White was the thunder. In the title game, White was a little more effective: 124 yards and three touchdowns on 20 carries. Bush averaged about the same yards per carry, but he only ran 13 times and scored one touchdown. The Trojans leaned on White’s strength.

What the hell.

Bush was doing what he usually did, dashing through the Texas defense and making men miss. But even Bush eventually got tackled on most of his runs, and eventually three Longhorns closed in on him, including star safety Michael Huff. Teammate Brad Walker (No. 48) was nearby enough, and Bush figured he’d set up White for a 20-yard walk to the end zone if he’d just sneak him the ball at the last second. It’s like if Bush were an option quarterback, except this was downfield with three defenders surrounding him instead of one read linebacker. Bush’s error in judgment cost USC at least three points and probably a touchdown, in a game the Trojans lost by three.

Bush released the ball at about the 20, or maybe the 19:

And the ball bounced off Walker at about the 18, though it may be the 19:

Weird sequence all around. It looks to me like Bush’s toss to Walker is never touched by Texas, and like it’s a slightly forward-moving pass, not a lateral. If that were the case, officials should’ve called a five-yard penalty and let USC keep the ball. I know this is a hilariously petty thing for me to be litigating in a public forum 11 years later.

Texas got a TD on a Young pitch to Selvin Young. The problem is that Young was clearly grounded before releasing the ball:

It wouldn’t be college football if we didn’t have chaos. And we did, with reported replay glitches hindering officials for much of the night.

In retrospect, I still love Pete Carroll’s aggressiveness. The way Young had played that night and all season, the difference between making him go 57 yards or 85 in two minutes wasn’t that big. White was a bruising back, and it’s hard to foresee that a guy who’s averaged 6 yards all night won’t be able to get 1 on a fourth down. But Texas stacked him up with a mass of bodies in the middle of the line.

The Longhorns faced deficits of:

That 12-pointer was with 6:42 left, after Matt Leinart found Dwayne Jarrett for a 22-yard touchdown. That was the biggest lead any team had had all night.

Then Texas’ defense gave up no points the rest of the way, and Young stitched together two touchdown drives (both punctuated in running TDs by him) less than four minutes apart in the nick of time. That was as Hollywood as this sport gets.

Sports Illustrated’s cover story from the issue that hit newsstands days later:

Still, heading into the Rose Bowl, the big question was, Which Young would show up? The brooding passer who in the regular-season finale against Texas A&M was pressing in the face of a surprisingly stiff challenge? The Heisman runner-up with the chip on his shoulder, who voiced his displeasure over not winning the trophy moments after Reggie Bush’s name was called? Or the fist-knocking, loose-limbed team leader whose dazzling physical skills are matched by his toughness and strength of will?

The answer came during pregame warmups, as Brown grooved to the beat of Justin Timberlake’s Rock Your Body. The guy could not have been less tense. Even after the Trojans turned a fumble by Longhorns punt returner Aaron Ross into an early 7-0 lead, Texas had no reason to panic.

247Sports’ massive oral history, featuring Texas assistant Bruce Chambers’ memory of watching Young run toward the right pylon in the last minute:

“You see Vince go through his progression. He looked at the primary, went to the secondary (tight end) and he even got to the third guy before he took off. And I thought that Justin Blalock did a tremendous job of over-setting the corner so that he would come inside and then collapsed him. Once that happened they had no containment. They had Frostee Rucker out there at 280-something pounds, he wasn’t going to catch (Young).”

To close: Mack Brown’s speech to Texas immediately after the game: