TUCSON -- Arizona State looked lifeless.

Down by 19 at the outset of the fourth quarter in Saturday’s Territorial Cup showdown with the Arizona Wildcats, the Sun Devils were in dire need of some kind of spark.

From his depth of life experiences as a three-year starting quarterback whose battled through adversity time and time again in his more than 30 times taking the field for ASU, Manny Wilkins drew from his memories of a sport he hadn’t played since his days at San Marin High School.

Well, he actually went straight to the video game version.

“So, I play 2K a lot,” he said, referring to 2K Sports’ NBA popular video game. “What we say in 2K, is like, if you’re down or whatever, if you’re down by 20, ‘Stop and a bucket. That’s all you’ve got to do, stop and a bucket.’”

A stop and a bucket. It’s a phrase commonly orated by basketball coaches. It seems simple; you’re down big, so go get the ball back and score on the other end. Chip away. Take it one step at a time. And above all, don’t panic.

Never panic.

“We knew that if we just chipped away slowly, if we all just stayed the course, that we’d have an opportunity,” Wilkins said.

In all reality, Saturday’s rivalry game was simply the epitome of that mindset. Moreover, it was the culmination of a season that had embodied that mindset.

In a year that has, essentially, felt like one long comeback — with plenty of smaller comebacks littered within it — the Sun Devils capped it off in fitting fashion, completing their biggest come-from-behind win since 2002, erasing a 19-point deficit to defeat Arizona, 41-40.

“I’m proud of these guys,” head coach Herm Edwards said. “The whole season’s been that way for us… It’s been this kind of game for us. We don’t panic. We just don’t. That’s not our DNA. As long as you don’t panic and you stay true to who you are, you’re going to have a chance at the end, that’s what I believe.”

~~~

It’s early in the second half, and ASU calls a timeout, trailing by double digits after an extended run by the opponent.

The Sun Devils have just lost a heartbreaker to Stanford. Manny Wilkins is crouched near the 25-yard line at Sun Devil Stadium, after having fired a completion over the middle of the red zone to Eno Benjamin that ultimately allowed the final seconds of the game to tick away in the red zone.

They sit at 3-4 with a 1-3 record in the Pac-12, having lost four of their last five contests. They’d once been a Top 25 team, albeit briefly. They’d beaten a perennial contender. They’d been given early glimmers of greatness.

Quickly, though, they had come back down to reality.

“We were in last place,” offensive coordinator Rob Likens later said, referencing the atmosphere following the loss to Stanford. “And it felt like the sky was falling.”

10 days later, the Sun Devils got a stop.

ASU showed something new when it beat USC on Oct. 27. The Sun Devils rallied from behind, after having blown an early lead, to earn their first road win of the season. A team that had lost four games by a combined 28 points was finally on the other side of the coin.

Okay, you’ve got the ball now. You’ve got life. Go get some points.

Besting the Trojans was only the beginning. ASU turned around to face a red-hot Utah team in Tempe. At that point, the eventual Pac-12 South champion Utes were in the Top 15 of the College Football Playoff Rankings and had won four in a row by an average of about 24 points. The Sun Devils weren’t hot, not yet at least. They were heating up.

When Utah came to town on Nov. 3, ASU played, arguably, its best game of the year. The Sun Devils finally clicked and ran the Utes out of the valley by a final of 38-20.

Let’s go ahead and call that a game-changing 10-0 run. That lit the fire and got ASU back in the ball game. And fending off UCLA on Nov. 10 was the clutch three-pointer that brought all of the Sun Devils’ new life to a boiling point.

What’s happened since is, really, a matter of perspective. A Nov. 17 loss to Oregon took ASU out of the running in the Pac-12. Some would say that’s an unsuccessful season.

To Herm Edwards, this season may not have truly been a success. He wants championships, and he’s made that clear since his arrival.

“A success? I don’t know about that,” he said. “We didn’t win the Pac-12… I said that when I took this job, and I think a lot of you people looked at me like I didn’t know what I was talking about. That’s what we’re going to do, win a Pac-12 championship.”

But success in college football is relative. ASU came up shy of a Pac-12 title but took a step in the right direction.

Some of that’s intangible. Sure, the Sun Devils went 7-5 last year, too, but to have truly hung in with every single team on their schedule, and to have overcome the heartbreak of continually falling just short in many of those contests speaks volumes to what lies at the core of this program.

“I told our team last night, that this has probably been the year I’m most proud of, because of how much we fought, how hard we fought,” Wilkins said. “There hasn’t been one game this year that we’ve let up.”

If nothing else, the Sun Devils — in the first year of a brand-new system, with plenty of brand-new faces — proved that they simply don’t stop fighting.

Not even when trailing by more points (19) than they had minutes remaining in their regular season (15) Saturday night.

“We lost some of those close games,” Manny Wilkins said. “We didn’t lose this one. So much adversity throughout this whole game. We just stayed poised, trusted the gameplan, there was nobody pointing fingers when something went wrong. And that’s why we finished with one more point than they did.”

~~~

One of the things that makes football so much different than basketball, though, is that one guy can’t do it alone. Only in very, very special circumstances does one polarizing player truly take over a football game the way, say, Kemba Walker took over on UConn’s magical road to a 2011 national title.

In that vein, seemingly everyone made a play for ASU during the seven minutes that effectively kept the Territorial Cup in Tempe.

It started, of course, with true freshman cornerback Aashari Crosswell. He’s had an up-and-down year but came up big when it truly did matter most. His interception in Arizona territory with 4:59 to play — and the Sun Devils still down by eight — made the miracle seem not just attainable, but almost likely.

“(Crosswell) doesn’t understand how big of a play he just made,” Wilkins said. “In the Territorial Cup, in the situation that we were in. As a 17-, 18-year old kid, he just doesn’t understand. 30 years down the road, people are going to remember him.”

Then there was Tyler Johnson, a redshirt freshman who worked his way into the defensive rotation throughout this season, and ultimately became a starter when all was said and done. Johnson had the fumble recovery of his life to set up Eno Benjamin’s go-ahead touchdown run in the final two minutes that ultimately finalized the score.

“He’s just like the rest of them,” Gonzales said of Johnson. “He’s growing up… It’s important, he wants to be better. He wants to get better every time. That’s the attitude you want in a football program.”

Notice the trend; it’s been the trend all year. They’re both freshmen. For anyone who’s followed the Sun Devils in 2018, this is nothing new, but another seven freshmen saw meaningful action in the Territorial Cup, all on defense.

“The experience is invaluable,” Gonzales said. “You can’t trade that for anything… They keep building. It helps us for the future. Hopefully, when we build this thing, you’ll never see seven true freshmen out there at the end. But, hey, we’re going to play the best players, it doesn’t matter who they are.”

ASU doesn’t know what bowl game it’ll play in next month. The Sun Devils could play in the Cheez-It Bowl, or the Las Vegas Bowl, or the Redbox Bowl — heck, maybe even the Sun Bowl.

At this point, that doesn’t really matter. ASU winning or losing that game, against who-knows-what opponent, won’t change the direction the program seems so clearly headed in.

And that was the idea all along. New staff? No worries. New system? No sweat. 3-4 start? Whatever. This is a long-term project, and it’s already well on its way.

Now, they’ll take this foundation — a foundation of resilience and determination, built on the backs of many should-be return players — into a new offseason, knowing full well they’ve set themselves up for a potentially bright future.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Edwards said. “I think now, the big thing for us is to get into recruiting mode… We’ve got some players to go get. That’s our next message.”

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