For Trojans, revenge isn’t best served cold; it’s to be put on ice

Finally, it’s payback time.

For more than a year now, USC football fans have longed for this day, when their boys could drop on Palo Alto a cold, heaping plate of revenge.

Like the rest of us, these fans will not soon forget that dark night of Oct. 6, 2007: the one-for-the-ages upset, 41-point underdog Stanford handing USC a 24-23 defeat that blew to bits a Trojans national title run and stuck a pitchfork in their pride.

Ever since that game’s final seconds, the USC faithful have had vengeful fantasies about embarrassing the Cardinal on its own turf. The Trojans, it is hoped and prayed for by those who live and die with this team, will prowl Stanford Stadium today like a pack of man-eating lions who all season have been forced to dine on alfalfa sprouts.

But there is often an intriguing disconnect between college football lovers and the teams they root for, a disconnect clearly seen in the latest installment of a rivalry that began in 1905.

During the run-up to a game such as this, the fans generally want frothy outbursts and angry talk about making painful amends.

Meantime, the players and coaches, at least the smart ones, work feverishly to sing “Kumbaya” and keep a lid on all hot emotions. That’s why, as talk radio and the Internet bubbled this week with the notion of dishing great punishment, you could no more pry angry talk of retribution from the soon-to-be combatants than you could pry Sarah Palin from her makeup kit.

Day after day we in the media tried to get someone from either side to bite. We asked the same question in many different ways, always hoping to provoke a nasty string of ticked-off chatter.

This pretty much went nowhere. Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh, coaches who are said to share less than warm relations, handed out praise for how the other man has gone about his job and worked to steer clear of dwelling on the day of infamy.

The players were no more accommodating. Trojans running back Stafon Johnson, when asked about revenge, replied flatly: “Stanford is a good team regardless if they beat us last year or they didn’t beat us last year. We have to come out with a great attitude if we want to win.”

Z-z-z-z-z-z . . .

“We don’t talk about it,” safety Taylor Mays said when asked the same question. (Note: Mays seemed to feign a studied sort of indignation, which I took as a sign that he’d been superbly drilled by USC coaches to frustrate all comers on this particular topic.) “Get back at Stanford? We don’t care about it. Why would we? We let everybody else talk about things like revenge. . . . We don’t care what people on the outside say.”

Harrumph!

How much more interesting would it be if all involved stepped from the spin zone and let loose with the same sizzling heat they’ll have the moment they walk into the locker room today?

What if Carroll just came out and said what we are pretty well convinced he feels deep in his soul? “It’s payback time, baby! I want to crush Harbaugh and those Google-geeks. . . . We’re headin’ north to beat the living heck out of them.” (Note: in this scenario he would use a choicer word than “heck.”)

And what if Harbaugh shot back like this? “Our statistical theorems find very little probability that we can be outsmarted by conniving Pete and those dunderheads. We will show ‘SC that last year was no fluke. If, that is, they’re smart enough to find their way to our stadium.”

Well, there’s interesting and then there’s sharply pragmatic. USC fans hardly ever get the pregame smack talk so many of them desire. According to sports psychologist Jim Loehr, this won’t change so long as Carroll is coach.

Carroll “knows what he is doing this week, exactly,” said Loehr, chairman of the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla. “He is being very, very careful how he represents this to the press and to his players. . . . He is saying to his players, ‘You are not likely to light the place up if you tap into the wrong emotions.’ ”

In other words, dim the anger and the desire to dish out comeuppance; these might provide a temporary boost, but they’ll wreak havoc on the kind of fluidity and rapid, tack-sharp decision-making needed to play well for the entirety of a football game.

If USC’s players want to play well against last year’s slayer of dreams, Loehr said, then “the sense of revenge is the last thing they need.”

When I caught up with Carroll, he confirmed that all week he has been emphasizing to his team the importance of not dredging up the past.

“Some may want it, but we don’t talk about revenge here,” the Trojans’ coach said in that hyperactive, everything-is-gonna-be-just-great way of his. “Utilizing that kind of negativity is not the best motivator. It’s not sustainable. What happens when you don’t have it, when we can’t call on it? There’s a higher motivation than trying to make someone pay for the past.”

All of this high-minded talk is nice and good, but it’s not necessarily what USC fans -- or those of us who love college football a little too much -- really want to hear. We’re just not that well-adjusted.

We want: pregame blather with USC and Stanford players and coaches talking angrily about last year and then about each other’s mommas.

We get: peace and reconciliation and talk of staying in the now.

We want: “This week, vengeance!”

We get: “Golly, Stanford is really, really good this year.”

Yeah, I know . . . bland. But we have to admit that aside from an odd glitch every so often, putting vengeance in the rearview mirror has had a way of working mighty well for Pete Carroll’s Trojans.

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kurt.streeter@latimes.com