This post is sponsored by EA Sports as part of their week long campaign promoting the launch of NCAA Football 2011.

If you want to talk about memorable Notre Dame moments, it seems like you can go in a number of ways.  One would be to sort of ignore the last twenty years and focus on the golden era, of Montana comebacks and Oklahoma win streak stoppers and Knute Rockne and the forward pass.  There are plenty.  Or you could focus on recent history and the smattering of great games and great moments that popped up during rather mediocre seasons, or perhaps buoyed a campaign that was doomed for an inglorious end (the FSU win in 2002, for example).  Or you can embrace the sadness and losing of the last couple decades and say "You know what, if I'm still an Irish supporter after all of this, I'm either a masochist or a true fan."

So I'm going the third route and choosing three moments/games that marked the ends of three recent eras for Notre Dame.

November 13, 2004: Pittsburgh 41 Notre Dame 38

This was essentially a battle for a Gator Bowl berth before the Big East was shot to hell a week later and Pitt ended up getting destroyed by Utah in the Fiesta.  It also turned out to be Ty Willingham's last home game as Notre Dame head coach.  (And because of how the schedule with Washington worked, his last game ever coached in Notre Dame Stadium.)  It was a wild back and forth affair that saw Panther QB Tyler Palko throw for five touchdowns and Brady Quinn three, with Darius Walker adding another two on the ground.  Greg Lee and Matt Shelton were the big performers on the outside, combining for over two hundred yards and plenty of big plays.

After being tied at 28 going into the fourth quarter, Pitt took a three point lead.  The two teams then traded touchdowns, and the visitors led by a field goal in the waning minutes of the game.  With 2:24 left, Brady Quinn orchestrated a quick drive that got the Irish in position for a game-tying 45 yard field goal.  DJ Fitzpatrick connected and it was a tie ball game when Pittsburgh took possession on their own 31 with sixty-six seconds left.

The crowd was loud and feverish, ready to shake Palko out of his comfort zone and get the game to overtime.  But just like they had been all day, the Irish pass defense was woefully overmatched, and on that very first play of the drive tight end Erik Gill calmly made his way up the sideline for 37 yards.  Pitt just waltzed another twenty yards and booted a 32-yard field goal to send the partisans home depressed.  (Or happy, if you were a Ty detractor who correctly assumed this would be the final nail in his coffin.)

It wasn't particularly surprising that the Irish defense couldn't stop Palko, who was absolutely brilliant the entire day.  But if there had been a time for the Irish to collectively step up and save Willingham's job, this would have been it.  (The next week at Southern Cal would have also been a suitable lifesaver, but that Trojan team was so stacked it would have been asking a little too much.)  It was not to be, and Ty was relieved of his duties as head coach a couple weeks later. 

January 3, 2007: LSU 41 Notre Dame 14

In addition to being the last game for many prominent members of the 2000's Irish (Brady Quinn, The Shark, Victor Abiamiri, Darius Walker, Ryan Harris, Derek Landri, Chinedum Ndukwe), this also marked both the last time JaMarcus Russell was an effective quarterback and the last time Notre Dame participated in a BCS game. 

To be fair, this result was not surprising.  Going into the extended New Orleans New Years vacation, we were not expecting a victory.  The LSU side was absolutely stacked, oozing with NFL draft picks and playing in front of what was basically a home crowd in the rebuilt Superdome.  (I remember Sean Payton's appearance on the Jumbotron garnering the biggest cheers that night.  Smart people, those Louisiana folk.)  But after falling behind 14-0, the Irish improbably rallied to tie things at 14 late in the first half. 

But again, as was a tendency under Rick Minter, LSU roared right back down the field in the closing seconds.  Facing a 2^nd and goal from the five, the Tigers spread everyone out and put Russell in shotgun.  This is a post sponsored by EA Sports, but even if it wasn't, I would point out that anyone who had ever watched football or played video games in their life knows that in a goal line situation with a large, somewhat mobile quarterback, spreading the defense out at the goal line is probably going to mean a draw.  This thought occurred to all of us in the stands, but not to anyone on the sidelines, and Russell powered his way in for a touchdown (3:26 of this video).  This game also featured a fake punt early on as well as a host of other coaching issues that could have been used in the Case Against Charlie Weis.

This game - three and a half years ago - marks the last time Notre Dame was on the national stage or more than a handful of games above .500.  The departing seniors left gave way to gaping hole where Ty just stopped recruiting, leading to the 3-9 season that followed.  And I would be wrong to bring up that wonderful 2007 season without discussing the highlight of it.

November 3, 2007: Navy 46 Notre Dame 44 (3OT)

Charlie Weis wasn't let go until two years and another loss to Navy after this game, but if you wanted to make the case, you could say the Weis Era - or at least any trust in it - ended here.  There were a lot of terrible losses by a lot of points during the 2007 season, but some of that could be traced to the Case of the Disappearing Recruiter, starring Tyrone Willingham.  But here was one prime example - with forty-plus years of winning hanging the balance -where Weis attempted to be smarter than everyone else in the room and ended up wearing a dunce cap.

Tied with Navy with 45 seconds left in regulation, Weis eschewed a 41-yard field goal opportunity to go for it on fourth and eight.  The result is one of my favorite highlights ever:

Poor Armando Allen went for what appeared to be a smart play on Ram Vela, getting low in an attempt to pick up the blitzer.  Vela chose a different route, leaping over Allen and crashing down on Evan Sharpley, who must have had no idea what happened.  What was Weis' reason for not kicking the field goal there?

Q. Can you talk about your decision not to kick what could have been a winning field goal at the end of regulation, 41 yards?
COACH WEIS: It was going against the wind and in practice, he couldn't make it from there. That's why we didn't kick it from there. That was a pretty simple one. We had a position on the field that we had to get to going into the wind. And we hadn't gotten there yet.

Q. How close did you need to be?
COACH WEIS: About four more yards. We go by what we see, and the wind factors in. When you get to that, we weren't at that spot. That's what we did.

Listen, nobody loves going for it on fourth down more than me.  Nobody.  But there was no reason to do this, not with as bad as the 2007 offense was.  It was just trying to be too smart when there was a simple solution.  Even if Notre Dame converts there, you still have a kicker you don't believe in kicking into the wind in a pressure situation. 

During most of Weis' tenure, I spent a lot of time thinking "Well, we're running this junk vanilla offense because he's saving the good stuff for later in the game."  Then I thought he was saving it for a bigger game, and so on and so forth.  I've written this here before, but many times college football comes down to having the best talent and then repeatedly giving that talent the ball.  There's no shame in handing the ball off to your four or five-star running back most of the game and then play-actioning only to throw to your stud wide receiver or tight end.  Weis always wanted to show that he was smarter than the other guy, not just beat them, and that was one of the reasons he is no longer coach of the Irish.

~

And there you have three moments that stand as low points of varying depths for the Irish over the last few coaching regimes.  We'll find out now if they mean anything, if they were all just the necessary bends in the road that got us to Brian Kelly and a Return To Glory^TM, or simply some of the most memorable moments from a decade to forget.

I'm sure you have some more positive memories to share in the comments, or if you like, you can continue the trend of highlighting the times that made you question why exactly you were an Irish fan.