Yikes. Win forever?

How about winning regularly?

That’s two defeats in three games, both in blowouts, and the line of “Stanford 55, USC 21” hurt most of all.

The 2009 Trojans already were on life-support when it came to their seven-year baseline aspirations — a BCS bowl, winning the Pac-10, finishing ranked in the top four.

None of that seemed likely for this team, after defeat No. 2, at Oregon. So the disappointment of all that finally, absolutely going out the window … is muted. (Pollsters, now, finally, will recognize that the 2009 Trojans are Just Not Very Good, after getting back up to No. 9 despite two defeats.)

It’s getting your hat handed to you by Stanford, in the Coliseum, on homecoming, that tells you where the USC program is right now.

Pete Carroll’s greatest test is now before him.

It is a two-part assignment:

1. Pull this team together and finish out the season with three victories. Over UCLA and Arizona and whatever random team shows up in whichever random bowl the Trojans shuffle off to.

2. Find some players … or re-program the ones he has … so the Trojans can get back to being what they were, from 2002 through 2008.

Looking back, and this is all an exercise in football forensics now, the 2009 season began going south when Mark Sanchez declared for the NFL draft.

Pete Carroll at first reacted with an astonishing lack of grace. And now we know why: He knew he needed a dominant offense in 2009 to cover for what would be a very green defense.

The pieces were there. All those tailbacks. A veteran line. A first-rate tight end. Competent receivers.

With Sanchez playing quarterback … maybe the Trojans outscore people all year. Or hold the ball long enough that their defense isn’t on the field very much.

But when Sanchez disappeared to the NFL … USC had issues of the sort Pete Carroll hadn’t experienced since Year 1. An offense without a leader. An offense that wound up with a freshman (Matt Barkley) starting. And a defense with a leader (Taylor Mays) but nothing much else aside from guys with great prep football resumes and precious little Pac-10 playing time.

The defense has collapsed, these past five weeks. The 27 points allowed to Notre Dame.  The 36 points by Oregon State. The 47 Oregon put up (with a USC-record 613 yards allowed) on the Trojans, a game in which USC’d defense looked completely lost — as well as overmatched.

And now the 55 Stanford just hung on them. The most points any USC football team ever has allowed.

Read that again. The most points USC ever has allowed.

This now is the first USC team getting worse — markedly worse — as the season goes on. That never happened under Pete Carroll. Not even in Pete’s first year, 2001, when he started 1-5 and finished 6-6. That unbeaten record in November games, when all of Pete’s previous teams were really rolling? Poof!

USC has issues all over its defense, but particularly at linebacker, where his guys rarely are in the right positions, and often don’t tackle when they are. We expected a drop off, after Cushman, Maualuga and Matthews left … but we didn’t expect this.

Actually, Pete has one more test: Figuring out a way to write his planned book, “Win Forever,” after this season of shocking collapses.

Maybe it’s not such a stretch if the Trojans somehow finish 10-3. But anything less, and “Win Forever” probably should be put on hold … for a time when the Trojans again resemble a program that might just win forever.