You could see it on Marcus Freeman’s face when JD Bertrand was called for the world’s most obvious targeting foul on the final drive, and you could see it again when Cal came within a whisker of catching the Hail Mary on the final play.

“This couldn’t just be easy, could it?”

It could not. Notre Dame finally won a game Saturday over California, 24-17, in a game that didn’t totally answer any of the questions surrounding these Irish but at least looked closer, most of the time, to the type of game they can win playing.

And to their credit, the Irish won this game with their resilience – from the offensive line, the defensive line, and maybe most importantly new starting quarterback Drew Pyne.

This season is back from the brink, at least for now

It’s hard to overstate how terrible Pyne looked on the first few possessions of the game for ND. He straight-up dropped a snap. He windmilled a two-yard screen to Michael Mayer into the dirt, shortly before tossing one five feet over the 6-7 tight end’s head. He tried and hilariously failed to run a Tyler Buchner-type zone read play to the perimeter.

Both OC Tommy Rees and coach Marcus Freeman let Pyne have it on separate occasions. Not that it helped Pyne, but it didn’t take a psychoanalyst to realize that neither blowup was really about him. It was about everything – letting the Ohio State game get away from them, collapsing against Marshall, getting left at the altar by two five-star recruits (Dante Moore and Keon Keeley) with a third (Peyton Bowen) potentially on the way, and the very quick ending to the honeymoon period for both coach and coordinator. Things were teetering.

To their credit, the Irish gathered themselves. With some help from a completely phantom offsides penalty that wiped out a missed field goal and preceded a long-awaited touchdown, ND tied the game at seven early in the second quarter, and from then on the game looked far closer to what the Irish wanted. Pyne never looked great, but after that scoring drive he almost always looked competent. For now, that will have to do.

In the trenches

Lord knows what the messaging was in practice, but whatever it was, the offensive and defensive lines for Notre Dame were miles – repeat, MILES – better than in either previous game this season.

It wasn’t exactly road grading like in the second half of last year, but ND was able to consistently get decent yards on the ground as the game went on. Audric Estime and Chris Tyree combined for 35 carries (Logan Diggs, notably, did not get one and I’m fairly sure he didn’t play at all), and they turned them into 139 yards. Not an explosive play in the bunch, but also very few ker-thunks.

And Pyne, who desperately needed a better line than the one that had been in front of Buchner so far, got one. He was rarely under severe heat.

The difference up front on defense was even more stark. Jacob Lacey and both Ademilola brothers especially wreaked havoc. But for an occasionally inexplicable failure to finish a play and drag down Jack Plummer, it was a virtually spotless performance from that unit, who held Cal’s freshman dynamo Jadyn Ott to only 44 total offensive yards despite the Bears’ clear desire to get him the ball.

Both units badly needed to improve if this ND season is going to be anything other than a disaster. Saturday was a welcome reminder that such improvement is at least on the table.

The train might find its way back to the tracks

The most important takeaway today, for me, is that a season that was heading off the rails at least now has a path to getting back to them. It is still a long, hard path, and it will almost certainly include a few more losses this year (I don’t see any world right now in which this team beats Clemson or USC, for instance, and ND has no right to assume wins in any of the other games either). But at least things are on something resembling stable ground now.

Hopefully, the Irish can move forward now that the monkey is off Freeman’s back. Like he said in his postgame interview, it’s the first of many. (Which, yeah, it had better be, no?)