When they visited for a round of golf this summer, Ty Willingham mildly probed Ara Parseghian for his wisdom on the long, lonely walk of a Notre Dame football coach. Despite the passing of nearly 40 years, they had come to South Bend under the most comparable of circumstances: The Fighting Irish down and out, the suggestions surfacing that the glory days were gone for good.

	Tyrone Willingham has been an unexpected emotional leader in his first season as Notre Dame's head coach.

"Go back in the papers to the time I took over," Parseghian said this week by phone, "and all the quotes sounded just like what was happening when Bob Davie left last year: 'Notre Dame couldn't win anymore.' 'The academic standards were too tough.' 'You couldn't get kids into school.' 'Notre Dame was done as a power.'"

They could've talked forever about the George O'Leary saga stripping the Golden Dome of its luster, about the burden of a black man coaching Notre Dame in the whitewashed culture of college football, about the administration and admissions and alumni. All of it. Yet, there was no use. Everything Willingham had ever done prepared him for Notre Dame, just like nothing he had ever done prepared him for it. Parseghian understands that, ultimately, a man had to sit in college football's chair of power to discover the truth for himself.

"Just hang the W's," Parseghian told Willingham.

This never changes here. Years ago, they told this to Parseghian too. He listened. He won nine straight games to start his first season in 1964, unbeaten and untied until the final game of the season, until an improbable national championship season crashed with a late-game collapse to Southern Cal. Those nine straight victories had come out of nowhere, out of the wildest Irish dreams from a 2-7 season. Parseghian visited campus last Saturday, witnessing the students and alumni wall to wall in the bookstore, the bed-sheet signs hanging off dormitory windows, the people packing the Grotto to light candles, a scene straight out '64, out of his sweetest season as Fighting Irish coach.

"There was that buzz, that excitement before everyone started down for the game in the stadium," Parseghian says. "When you wouldn't have expected this, it's happening again now. That's how these things (go) sometimes. They just come out of nowhere. I have to admit: It brought the memories flooding back to me."

Eventually, he won two national championships, but that unbeaten run to start his Irish coaching career had a pureness to it. Out of yesterday's failure, there rose victory after victory after victory. He sees it happening for Willingham, his Irish 6-0 against all odds and it's with part pride, part sadness that Parseghian says: "Ty is riding the greatest crest he'll ever ride here." This won't go forever. Maybe the run doesn't make it past unbeaten Air Force on Saturday night, or powerful Florida State in two weeks, but there is perhaps no rush in coaching like resurrecting the Fighting Irish.

This was the beautiful, brief interlude of innocence when his own introduction to Notre Dame left him looking like a modern-day Rockne, when one wintry Saturday in South Bend in '64 the student section started chanting, "ARA, STOP THE SNOW!"

Downstairs on the field, Parseghian turned to one of his assistant coaches and asked: "Can I?"

If this legendary story was spoken in half-jest, it still underlined how bringing back the glory at Notre Dame can intoxicate a man. Parseghian made it 10 years on the job, but eventually this job wore him down, spit him out and left him languished. He still loves it. In some ways, he still lives it. Soon, he is leaving his nearby Granger, Ind., home for his winter house in Florida, watching the rest of the season on television, watching the deft touch of Willingham make his tomorrow tougher on himself.

"You win like Ty's won and you become a victim of your own success," Parseghian said. "I lost two games the next year in 1965 and they wanted to know what had happened to us. It would be nice if you could start your career 6-5, 7-4 and 8-3, but it doesn't always work that way.

"The thing is, you've got to grab what you can, while you can."

Parseghian sounds fascinated with Willingham, remembering the golf game over the summer when the unfailingly polite and thoughtful Willingham was as sparse with his words to the old coach, as he is in those press conferences long on awkward silences. "Absolutely nothing off the cuff," Parseghian noticed. "Everything is well thought out. Everything is guarded."

Parseghian truly admires his understated, unspoken way, a cool, calm cover for what Black Coaches Association president Bob Minnix, a Notre Dame alumnus, considers maybe the most pressurized coaching circumstance in college football history: A black man coaching the Fighting Irish.

"This is a social study," Parseghian said, and he's completely correct. This makes it different than anything Rockne and Leahy, Devine and Faust, Holtz and Davie, ever had to endure under the Golden Dome. Yet, to watch him work, this leaves Parseghian holding onto hope that this season that ends at USC too, could be 1964 happening again.

"Ty is one of the very coolest I've ever seen under pressure," he said. "His poise is one of the most impressive things I've ever witnessed at Notre Dame ... This team is a reflection of him. They've learned the little things that are the difference between winning and losing."

"You do know that Notre Dame goes to Southern California for its final game of the season, just like we did?" Parseghian asked. "Ty has a wonderful chance to do the same thing now. He has a chance to keep riding that crest."

From those warm summer days they spent on the golf course, to these autumn Saturdays in South Bend where the wintry weather could inspire those students to ask the impossible of Ty Willingham, Parseghian's words of wisdom haven't changed for the new man in college football's power seat. Thirty-eight years later on a Notre Dame football Saturday, Ara Parseghian watched the bookstore packed, the bed-sheets hanging, the Grotto candles burning and this is the thing he wants Willingham to understand: Grab what you can, while you can. Ride that crest. Ride it.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for The Record (N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPNWoj@aol.com.