Quarterbacks are defined by wins. The more dramatic the win, the better the quarterback. There’s a reason they keep stats on late-game comebacks.

With comeback #1, Nick Foles has officially arrived.

It was the missing piece from a successful rookie season. He had led the way to securing a bowl bid and put up decent stats but up until this point Foles had failed with the game on the line and the ball in his hands.

If you don’t count the muff drive Nick Foles was 0-3 on potential game-winnings drives in the final four minutes. Down three at Washington (post-foot) with 2:29 on the clock he took a sack with 43 seconds left and threw an interception with 26 seconds left. Down two with 2:06 left at Cal was the Faux Pass. Tied with 1:54 to go at ASU (pre-muff) was a three-and-out.

Throw in the horrid display of offense in the third quarter of the USC game and you’ll have to forgive us for doubting a bit when the final four minutes rolled around.

To say the game-winning drive came out of nowhere would be an insult to nowhere. After taking a 14-7 lead in the second quarter the Cats had five consecutive drives that didn’t even get to midfield. We had 27 yards of offense in the third quarter. That overthrow of C.Gronk on third down was the type of play that can haunt you for months. The game was tied heading into the fourth but it felt like a two-touchdown deficit.

So, naturally, Nick Foles manufactured a 4-minute, 10-play, 80-yard drive to retake the lead. Of course he orchestrated three third-down conversions. Without question he audibled into a fade route and threw the pass perfectly.

That’s what heroes do.

Heroes also don’t let a little pain get in the way. Nick’s Luke Skywalker glove looked twice as big this week. He couldn’t even hand the ball off with his left hand. To top it off Matt Scott wasn’t in uniform due to injury so if Foles had been unable to finish we would’ve had to turn the game over to a guy without a single collegiate pass attempt.

And did I mention all this was on the road against a team that was 48-2 in its last 50 home games?

The defense deserves a lot of credit too. Don’t brush off the fact that we just won two consecutive road games after scoring just 20 and 21 points. No, we weren’t exactly facing Jake Plummer and Matt Leinart but that side of the ball could have folded after the Oregon game and it has instead done just the opposite.

The Arizona defense did not end the USC game by barely holding on. The Cats made quick work of the final Trojan threat. Sack, incomplete, incomplete, incomplete. We only had to sweat for 54 seconds of game time.

(Well, that’s not entirely true. Arizona continues to make up its own click-killing strategies. Taking a knee too soon, calling timeouts, falling down before contact. Someday Mike Stoops will get over that ’04 Washington State game.)

You could argue the ASU game was merely surviving against a bad team, but don’t even try to dismiss this Trojan team as worthless. USC hasn’t been USC! this year but they still went into Columbus and beat the Big Ten champs. They still throttled Cal and beat Oregon State. They were still ranked coming into the game.

They were still ranked. Is there extra significance to Arizona re-entering the top 25 the same week USC’s 130-poll streak ended? We’ll have to wait until the fall of 2010 to find out.

What we do know is the fall of 2009 is officially a success. Even if Nebraska blows us out in the Holiday Bowl (which, for the Huskers, would mean a score like 11-3) this has been a very good season. Anytime you finish with a winning record and beat USC and ASU (both on the road! in back-to-back weeks!) you have to feel good about yourself.

For you fans of the Territorial Cup you’re going to want to write this one down: In the past 50 years the UA has finished a season with twice as many wins as ASU only three times. 1994, 1998, and 2009. Enjoy every second of it.

Enjoy the day Nick Foles became a hero.

Dream of the day he becomes a legend.

Are you over the Cal loss yet? Me neither. Let’s mope together.

In the first quarter Arizona had two possessions, two first downs, and zero points. So much for a fast start to get a struggling Bear team to quit early.

Since we (rightfully) treated WSU like a scrimmage we had three weeks to prepare for Cal. The new wrinkle on offense was an odd one – splitting Chris Gronk out wide and using him as the motion man. Not only did it eliminate the threat of handing off to a wide receiver, it also made Gronk run 15 yards before getting ready to block on running plays.

To top it off, on the one tricky play we were setting up all game – C.Gronk going in motion and running deep down the sideline – Foles missed him. Back to the wrinkle drawing board.

Remember last year’s Cal game when we turned the game around with 28 third-quarter points? This year the UA opened the second half with five straight three-and-outs. Washington State’s offense wasn’t that bad.

The Wildcat defense didn’t give up a touchdown until midway through the third quarter and even then it took a 14-yard punt to set it up. We’re still waiting for the offense and defense to show up in the same non-scrimmage-like game.

Give Matt Scott credit. He came in after the fifth three-and-out, did what he does best, ended the first-down drought and got the team started on a TD drive. I hope we continue to use Scott’s legs to shake things up when they need a good shaking.

Rule of thumb: You don’t want fewer points than your ranking if you want to stay ranked.

How hard did Cal try to give this game away? Riley’s Longshore-esque interceptions, going for two too early, a pass interference penalty on 2nd-and-17, another PI on 3rd-and-12, and missing the final extra point in an eight-point game. But nobody out-Arizonas Arizona. Which brings us to…

• Turn a 15-yard loss into a nine-yard gain
  Not a three-yard loss. Not a seven-yard loss. Fifteen. Now that’s some poor tackling. The Cal player was so far behind the line of scrimmage even Jim Marshall was embarrassed.
• Forget the rules of football
  What would it take to top the double pass? Trying to throw the ball through the uprights for three points? Running a bootleg with the ball stuffed in your pants? I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas. But I do know this: Nick Foles is undefeated in games decided by fewer than one extremely bizarre play.

Cal only loses to USC and OSU at home. USC only loses to Stanford at home. You think they’ll let us borrow the Tree for December 5?

If you were using your TWIT-Pac decoder ring you knew once we lost to Cal it was OK to root against ASU, so at least we have that. Sure enough the Ducks put a beating on the Devils to get back to their winning ways, just in time to face our guys.

Stanford provided the blueprint for stopping Oregon: You don’t. Not a single Pac-10 team has held the Masoli-led Ducks below 42 points. That means we need six touchdowns just to stay in the game. Zendejas shouldn’t even bother warming up.

Here are the updated bowl projections (assuming the favorite wins each game), if you dare…

The big winner this past week was obviously Stanford who is now in the driver’s seat for the Holiday Bowl. Not a bad splash for your first postseason appearance in eight years.

The big loser over the weekend was Your Frustrating Arizona Wildcats. From the top 20 to battling UCLA for the Poinsettia Bowl.

But, hey, that’s nothing a big upset victory can’t fix.

We’ve been here before.

Let’s do it again.

Why can’t we just lose like normal teams? When it comes to big games Arizona doesn’t do “Their QB just caught fire and there was nothing we could do” losses or “They were simply the better team” losses. No, it has to be something you’ve never seen before. Around here, once-in-a-lifetime plays happen every other year.

Foot Game, meet the Double-Pass Game. As if our armoire of traumatizing memoirs wasn’t already full.

In the grand scheme of things this loss doesn’t change anything. The team still controls its own fate for the league championship while at the same time being right on pace for the 7-5 season we hoped for in August. Losing at Cal doesn’t change any of that, but that’s the point. We wanted this game to change things.

We wanted a team that was going to rise to the occasion and play its best ball when the stakes were highest. We wanted a team of destiny that was going to take advantage of all the good fortune going on around us.

The extraordinary excitement leading up to this game wasn’t so much because of something the Wildcats did as it was because of what was going on everywhere else. If USC was undefeated and in the top five we wouldn’t have thought twice about being 4-2 in league play. But USC has three losses, Cal has three losses and Oregon has lost twice. OSU and Stanford waited until after losing to us to get red hot. We are getting every needed break. But breaks don’t mean you have a better team.

So why the doom and gloom? Because there are two sides to the equation. One is being in a position to win a championship. The other is having a team good enough to do so. We knew the Cats wouldn’t be eliminated with a loss at Cal, but we knew this was a measuring stick game, and Arizona didn’t measure up.

Does this mean we shun the team the rest of the way? Of course not. You don’t stop loving your dad when you discover he isn’t Superman. You’re just sad for a while.

The Wildcats didn’t roll over after the Washington loss and they won’t roll over now. You wish you were going into the Oregon game on a Stanford-like roll but we are what we are, and that’s still allergic to success.

The program hasn’t yet learned how to play from in front. We had our first chance with the yellow jersey but instead of riding like Lance Armstrong we rode like…uh…a cyclist other than Lance Armstrong.

So we find ourselves back in a familiar role: middle-of-the-standings, unranked underdog with a top team coming to town for a game on network TV. Thus knocketh opportunity a second time.

We found Nick Foles behind Door #2. Maybe we can find late-season magic there too.

Do you believe? Do you even want to believe? The bigger the dreams the harder they fall. Do we ignore the Cal game, focus on the “Win three and we’re in” mantra and dive heart-first into the Oregon showdown, or do we scale hopes back to 7-5 and prepare for the worst on Saturday?

I’m not going to decide. Conference champions win games like this, but 7-5 teams can too. I’m going to go to GameDay. I’m going to participate in the Red Out. Not because it’s the first step in a miraculous run toward a dream, but because my team is playing at home and we can win a really big game.

We’ll worry about scenarios and expectations again next week. This week is about packing the Stadium, making a ton of noise, and storming the field.

So, yes, I want a little zing in my zang-zang.