The University of Southern California football team had just scored a quick-strike first-half touchdown, but it wasn't the precision that caught Hawai'i free safety Leonard Peters' eye that moment in 2003 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

It was the sight of NFL Hall of Famer and 1981 Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Allen, a USC alum, on the Trojans' sideline.

"I saw Marcus Allen just standing there and he's like a legend, you know what I mean?" Peters said. "And, I thought, 'I might not get the chance to meet him again, so...' "

So, Peters brushed himself off and trotted over to shake hands. Where upon a surprised Allen, "told me I should get back in the game and focus," Peters recalls.

As if playing the Trojans, the No. 1 team in the land going on three seasons now, isn't difficult enough, there is all that surrounds them. The white horse, the tradition and, as Peters discovered, the living legends.

It isn't just the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, Matt Leinart, and contender Reggie Bush on the field to contend with, it is also the ones on the sideline.

"I was in awe," Peters recalls. "I mean, it was USC; it was a bigger crowd than I've ever seen (73,654); it was so loud."

The crowd will be smaller in 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium for Saturday's season opener, but the task hardly shrinks against a team that has enhanced its standing since the last time they met. Back then, the Trojans were "only" No. 4 in the polls.

Now there is talk of not only a three-peat or, as they put it in Exposition Park, a "three-Pete" but of the Trojans' place in college football annals.

Ever since USC beat Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl to position itself for the run, this has become as much a date with a slice of history, whichever way it goes, as a game for the Warriors. It has, with national cable audience and afternoon game on a holiday weekend, become a prime stage for a Warrior team that usually plays its games after much of the nation has gone to sleep.

After opening previous seasons with a yawn — and a couple losses — against Florida Atlantic, Appalachian State, Eastern Illinois, Montana and Portland State, this is a horse of an entirely different color, even without Traveler VII's presence.

"I mean this is big-time," said Peters, a three-year starter and co-captain. "I've been looking forward to this game, studying for it, ever since they won that last (national) championship. I've been talking to the younger players, taking them under my wings since the first day of camp telling them what it is going to be like, what I've learned from playing against them."

And, if Peters should happen to see his old friend Allen on the sideline again Saturday.

"I'll say 'hi' to him again," Peters said. "But, this time, after the game."

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.