The refrain felt frustratingly familiar. Here again, in the wake of another disappointing defeat, was the same rosy message from Lincoln Riley, reassuring the public that USC was really just a few plays, a few stops, a few inches away from where its coach wanted them to be.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Still, however close USC might have come, however “battle-tested” it might now be, the harsh reality is Riley has lost seven of his last 12 as the Trojans coach. That’s equivalent to the worst 12-game stretch of Clay Helton’s tenure as USC’s coach.

With No. 4 Penn State on tap Saturday at the Coliseum, the Trojans now find themselves playing for their College Football Playoff lives in mid-October, with zero room for error.

“I promise you,” Riley said this week, “we’re still a very confident team. This isn’t some team that has two losses where we got our ass kicked. No, that’s not the case. We know what we’re capable of.”

Miller Moss had a lot of time to consider that subject on the long flight home from Minneapolis on Oct. 5.

“The most important thing for us right now,” the quarterback said, “is everything we stood for, we worked for, all the messages we said to the team that said what we were about, when you face adversity like this, that’s when that gets tested the most.”

Coming up, against Penn State this weekend, is that fork-in-the-road moment.

“We have two pretty clear choices,” Moss continued. “Double down on who we are and get closer as a team and go forward with the great opportunity we have this weekend, or let this affect us and deter us from what we ultimately want to do.”

We should, by Saturday night, have a much better idea which path the Trojans have chosen.