Las Vegas ? Every once in a while, you just have to say you got beat by somebody who had one of those games he has probably dreamed about all of his life.

Nick Young wasn’t going to let Southern California lose Saturday night, no matter how valiant Wichita State’s comeback effort was.

The 6-foot-6 Young couldn’t be stopped, not even by the Shockers’ lock-down defender, P.J. Couisinard, who was giving up three inches.

Couisnard had Young late, as the shot clock was near expiration and WSU trailed by just two points, 55-53. Young had to try an almost impossible shot, driving toward the top of the key with Couisnard in his face. He stepped back slightly, launched the shot and it went in with 1:03 remaining.

It was the biggest shot in one of Young’s biggest games – he scored 24 points on 11-of-14 shooting. And it also helped send WSU, which came to Vegas with a No. 8 national ranking in its pocket, to its second consecutive defeat after Friday night’s loss to New Mexico.

This town wasn’t good to WSU last weekend. WSU’s losses to two unranked teams will probably cause the Shockers to fall drastically in the rankings.

That’s not necessarily such a bad thing. The No. 8 ranking is a huge target. After Southern Cal’s win, some of the Trojans players reacted as if they’d just won an NCAA Tournament game. The Shockers looked sluggish in Vegas. And some things were exposed by both New Mexico and USC.

“If there is a good thing about these two losses, I think the timing is pretty good,” Shocker senior forward Kyle Wilson said. “We get to get away from the game for a few days and we can kind of forget about them and then come back and get re-motivated for conference season. It’s not going to get any easier.”

No, it’s not. If the Shockers showed a flaw in Vegas, it was that they aren’t quite ready to take a punch and get right back up.

USC turned the game into a free-for-all for a while in the first half, which is when the Trojans used a 22-6 run to take a 28-21 halftime lead.

The free-for-all wasn’t pretty. It included a cheap shot by Trojans guard Lodrick Stewart, the brother of Kansas’ Rodrick Stewart, who floored the Shockers’ Matt Braeuer with an elbow as Braeuer was fighting through a screen on the defensive end.

Braeuer crumpled to the floor for several minutes. In the meantime, Shocker teammate Phil Thomasson threw a USC player to the floor and was called for a technical. The refs always see the second infraction, after all. Braeuer didn’t play again, spending the second half at the end of the bench wary of drawing a deep breath.

Southern Cal is a bigger, more physical team than the Shockers and the Trojans used that edge to their advantage.

“They stepped up the intensity and we didn’t do a very good job of matching it in the second half,” Wilson said. “We kind of shriveled up instead of hitting them right back.”

One thing is true about the Shockers, though. They don’t go away. Down 42-32 with 13:30 remaining, they started a methodical comeback led by Couisnard, who missed the New Mexico game with food poisoning.

Couisnard played 25 minutes against USC and had 13 points. He managed to stay in the game though his stomach was rumbling. Couisnard’s entry into the game early in the first half drew a loud ovation from the several hundred WSU fans who made the trip to Vegas. And it seemed to energize the other Shockers.

Couisnard said he thinks he had some bad eggs, or perhaps a bad biscuit, during breakfast with his family Friday.

“I don’t know what happened, but it got me,” he said. “It got me real bad.”

So did New Mexico and USC. Now it’s time to regroup. “I don’t think this team is used to having that kind of target on its back,” Wilson said. “Last year we were still so new that we were able to sneak up on teams. This year, we’re not sneaking up on anybody.”