CLUTCH PLAY

She never saw their faces. She only felt their hands.

“Huge hands,” Danielle Dauenhauer said.

Tired hands.

Sweaty hands.

“My heart was pounding right out of my chest,” Malcolm Wooldridge said.

“We had a long practice that day, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out,” Bernard Riley said.

She didn’t know their names. She only heard their voices.

“I was out of my mind, scared, panicked, and they had such calming voices,” Dauenhauer said.

Nervous voices.

Kid voices.

“She was screaming into my face, and I’m trying to tell her everything was all right . . . but I didn’t know how much more I could take,” Riley said.

About 1 a.m. Friday, Dauenhauer, a USC sophomore, fell backward out of her second-floor apartment window and was impaled through her buttocks by the prongs of two wrought-iron security bars.

As gruesome as it appeared on the local news, this woman dangling upside down six feet above the ground, the bars likely saved her life.

What happened next was about restoring our faith.

Four Trojan football players heard her screams, slammed through the jammed back door of their apartment, and rushed outside.

As other horrified witnesses stayed behind their windows or watched from the street, the players surrounded her and comforted her.

Two of them--defensive linemen Riley and Wooldridge--took turns holding up her shoulders so the bars wouldn’t penetrate further.

The other two--receiver Steve Stevenson and safety Kyle Matthews--shooed gawkers away and helped keep her calm.

It might have been for 10 minutes. It might have been 20.

“It felt like forever,” Dauenhauer said.

Whatever it was, it worked.

The police and rescue workers arrived, Dauenhauer was transported to County-USC Medical Center with the bars intact but only four inches deep.

Surgery removed them. Stitches closed the wound. She was discharged Friday night.

She later heard who had helped her, but she wasn’t sure of their names, and had never even seen their faces.

Until Tuesday, when Dauenhauer hobbled across campus and into their giant embrace.

“Thank you,” she said to Riley, disappearing into his hug.

“Goodness, you’re walking!” he said.

“I’m so lucky you were there,” she said to Stevenson during their hug.

“Just doing what anybody would do,” he said.

Elsewhere, a Penn State quarterback is awaiting arraignment on possible charges of delivering a racially motivated beating.

An Arizona State quarterback has been suspended after being arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

A Florida State star defensive tackle has just been arrested on a charge of simple battery for allegedly pushing around his girlfriend.

So the USC guys didn’t save a life. So maybe, as Stevenson said, they did what anybody would have done.

At this point in the evolution of the big-time collegiate athlete, we’ll settle for that.

It was good. We’ll take good.

It was honorable. We need honorable.

It was the first thing Coach Paul Hackett discussed at Friday afternoon’s team meeting.

“I told them, ‘Guys, this is what I’ve been talking about,’ ” he said. “ ‘Acting like a team. Reaching out like a team. Nothing makes me prouder than this.’ ”

A library search of the words “USC” and “impaled” revealed that they had been recently used in a different sort of story.

It was a game story. It was USC’s 28-19 loss to Texas Christian in the 1998 Sun Bowl.

Two seasons later, flush with this opening win over Penn State and an off-week victory of character, the meanings here have changed. The context is different.

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It was, perhaps appropriately, about a Smash Mouth poster.

Dauenhauer, a communications major from Sacramento, was sitting on her window-high bed, preparing to hang the poster on her wall, when she slipped backward through the screen and tumbled toward the ground.

She felt herself somersault. She felt herself painfully stop.

She found herself staring down at dead leaves.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why am I not on the ground?’ ” she said. “Then I felt the pain, and started screaming.”

The players sitting in a nearby apartment were, perhaps appropriately, watching “The Jerry Springer Show” on TV.

They heard the screams and thought it was a fraternity prank.

“Then I thought it was something on ‘Jerry Springer,’ ” Wooldridge said.

When they heard a second scream, they leaped to their feet and charged for the rarely used back door of the first-floor apartment. But it wouldn’t budge. So they hit it, and hit it, and finally it swung open.

They ran outside, turned toward the screaming . . . and there she was.

Face down, in a Trojan T-shirt and boxer shorts, hanging aloft by her rear end.

“It didn’t look real,” Stevenson said. “We all kind of went into shock.”

Supporting her 165-pound frame with her arms, she was also going into shock.

“I can’t even do a pull-up, so I didn’t know how long I would last like that,” she said. “There was so much pain, and I was worried the bars would slide further into me.”

She also worried she was too high for anyone to reach.

“Good thing I didn’t go to an all-girls’ school,” she said. “I really needed somebody big to help me.”

Then she felt the hands, and heard the voices, and was surrounded by the warmth.

“It was just instinct, the same things you use in football,” Riley said. “You see something happen, you react.”

He and Wooldridge, weary and nervous, took turns holding her shoulders. The other two players chased away the voyeurs.

Somebody mentioned blood, and she started screaming even louder.

“I told her, ‘There is no blood,’ ” said Riley, fibbing. “That quieted her for a second.”

Then a video camera showed up, and the screams were filled with embarrassment.

“She was shouting, ‘I look so stupid, this is so horrible,’ ” Riley said. “I told her, ‘You do not look stupid. It’s going to be fine.’ ”

Despite all that has happened, and will happen, in the world of college athletics, sometimes you think Bernard Riley is right.

Sometimes his deep and soft voice reassures not just one screaming woman, but all of us.

Sometimes you think, everything is going to be fine.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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USC is willing to gamble on defensive in hopes of creating more turnovers. Page 5

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Colorado tailback Cortlen Johnson says a toe injury will keep him on sideline against USC. Page 5