(Shotgun Spratling/Neon Tommy)

All the telltale signs were there from the Trojans’ seven nonconference defeats – the slow start, the turnovers, the spotty defense, the indifference on the boards. Throughout those first 31 minutes, USC trailed the Stanford Cardinal at the Galen Center on Thursday night, showing precious few signs of being able to come back and upend a better team.

They did, however, in the final nine minutes through the strength of a pair of game-winning free throws from Jio Fontan that gave the Trojans (6-8, 1-0) a 71-69 upset win over the Cardinal (9-5, 0-1) to open Pac-12 conference play and, finally, a quality win to hang their hats on after so many near misses.

“You’ve got to get sick of losing at some point,” head coach Kevin O’Neill said after the game.  “You’ve got to stop worrying about your stats at some point, and you've got to start worrying about winning. For the last two games... we looked more like a team that was interested in winning instead of losing."

Yet in the first half, his players didn’t look interested in much at all. By O’Neill’s own admission, the perpetually slow-starting Trojans came out of the gate flat and the Cardinal pounced, bullying USC on the glass to the tune of a rebounding 20-8 advantage and piling on 11 second-chance points. Stanford looked the part of the team that won last year’s NIT Tournament, taking advantage of the Trojans’ mistakes with 10 points off of turnovers and nailing 7 of their 13 three-point attempts, several of which came on open looks courtesy of botched defensive rotations.

USC, meanwhile, struggled to get in a rhythm. The dribble-drive attack that has come to define its offense over the last half-dozen games was choppy, at times generating quality three-point opportunities (USC would hit 4-of-6 in the first half) while short-circuiting in others on account of forced shots.

“Tonight was a bad start,” O’Neill said. “We didn't have energy. We didn't play together. We weren't playing with force.”

The one constant, both in that period and the start of the second, was USC’s inability to gain a foothold. Time and again, the Trojans would chip away at the deficit, only to watch Stanford pull away again.

Like in the first half, down 30-24, when Fontan first assisted on a Eric Wise three-pointer and then wove his way down the lane for a layup and foul. A make would have knotted the game up for the first time since its opening minute; instead, Fontan missed and the Cardinal closed the half on a 12-4 run, giving them a 42-33 lead at intermission.

In the second half, USC opened on a 10-5 run to trim the lead to 47-43. During the run, Omar Oraby picked up a pair of offensive rebounds off his own misses before getting to the line and splitting the free throws. Forty-two seconds later, the deficit was back to 8 after the Cardinal’s Andy Brown scored on a backdoor cut, and Aaron Bright juked his way to a layup on a behind-the-back ball fake that recalled Rajon Rondo. Starting wing Byron Wesley left the game early in the second half with an apparent back injury and did not return, depriving USC of its third-leading scorer from the first half.

When USC finally took the lead on an Aaron Fuller jumper, they fell victim to an 8-2 Cardinal run that left USC down two possessions with just over four minutes remaining.  A Trojan team that had folded in so many close games looked ready to do so again.

This time, they didn’t.

“The adversity brought us together. It forced us to stay together and play harder,” Fontan said. “We knew…. if we just stuck with the gameplan, after a while, it would begin to wear on them.”

Every player that O’Neill called on delivered in his own way.

Fuller hit that jump shot but made even bigger play immediately before it, skying to block Stanford’s Josh Heustis to preserve a 51-all tie. 

Dewayne Dedmon, in O’Neill’s words, took charge of the game before fouling out. With 3:15 remaining, Dedmon fouled out on a questionable call after scoring six straight Trojan points in what Fontan labeled “one of his best second halves.” The game was tied at 65 but it didn’t feel that way; with Stanford in the double bonus, and Wise sitting on four fouls of his own, USC teetered on the brink of giving the game back for good. Wise delivered 14 points while mired in foul trouble.

Freshman Brendyn Taylor came in cold with 10 minutes left and played with a maturity that belied his inexperience, drilling a jumper to put USC in front 55-53 and later hauling in a crucial rebound, a play that his coach called “big-time.”

Freshman walk-on Chass Bryan topped that, scoring 10 crucial points and playing all but two minutes of the second half, some alongside Fontan and some in his stead as part of a small-ball lineup.

Collectively, they all made sure that Stanford’s three-point well ran dry, limiting the Cardinal to just 2-of-6 shooting from beyond the arc in the second half.

And it was Fontan who came through the most. O’Neill said USC’s strategy was to take Stanford point guard Chasson Randle out of the game and he was made invisible thanks to Fontan, who hounded the Cardinal’s second-leading scorer into a scoreless outing on 0-of-6 shooting. The senior point guard led USC with 15 points, the last four of which put USC ahead for good on go-ahead free throws after getting fouled on a pair of layup attempts.

“I’ve done a better overall job this year of making free throws, so I feel a lot more confident now,” Fontan said of his mindset at the line. “The timing didn’t really matter, it was just a matter of staying locked in and trying to shoot it with confidence.”

“[I] couldn't ask for more,” O’Neill said of Fontan’s performance. “I thought he controlled the game completely down the stretch. He did a great job leading our team. Clutch free throws, clutch baskets, clutch plays. That's what you want your senior captain to do and he did all of those things tonight.”

It almost wasn’t enough, though, as Stanford threatened one last time with seven seconds left. But Randle missed a potential game-tying jumper –
“I thought it was in,” Fontan admitted – and Dwight Powell botched a follow-up dunk at the buzzer, sending both the Trojans and the Galen Center crowd into celebrations for the second time in four days following Sunday’s overtime win against Dayton.

Together, those games mark a possible convalescence of sorts for the Trojans after that brutal start, not just in the result, but the way they came about.

“You'd like to think you got your tail kicked a few times, and it made you tougher,” O’Neill said. “We had to tough these out. We had to make free throws to win. We had to make stops to win. We had to rebound to win.

“Those kinds of things make you or break you.”

Against Stanford, it made them undefeated in the Pac-12 and, for now, tied atop its standings with third-ranked Arizona.

It hardly makes up for an autumn of missed opportunities, but a team searching for consistency, and for a win to build on, just may have found it.

Reach Mike Piellucci here. Follow him on Twitter here.