When Fighting Irish officialdom, still stinging from last weekend's 41-10 loss at No. 1 U.S.C. to complete a disappointing 6-5 season in coach Ty Willingham's third year under the Golden Dome, fired him early this week, Whiting had had enough.

"Notre Dame's arrogance..." he began, as he shook his head while being interviewed by South Bend station WNDU-TV. "I'm a Notre Dame fan all my life and I turned in my tickets Tuesday..."

Whiting was what Grantland Rice would call a "subway alumnus," even if the only Subway in South Bend is a national fast-food outlet by that name.

But Whiting's was one of many stunning reactions to only the latest in Notre Dame's recurring image desecrations.

"I just don't understand how they can go through this same thing again," said Gladys, a septuagenarian retired teacher. "Their image is really suffering."

While the aftershocks of l'affaire Willingham reverbrated throughout N.D. Nation, one major tremor included several blogologists' insistence that the Irish fired Willingham because former Notre Dame assistant Urban Meyer had become available.

Meyer, an Ashtabula, Ohio native who had guided Utah to a four-year 38-8 record and this year led the Utes to a perfect 11-0 regular season finish and barged into the Bowl Championship Series bowl picture, had made it known he had an "out" clause in his Utah contract for three schools -- Ohio State, Michigan and Notre Dame.

He seemed signed and virtually delivered for annointment as Notre Dame's 26th coach of varsity football. All that would be missing was the ceremonial white smoke and appearance of Notre Dame President Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., at a second-floor open window of the Administration Building above which rests the Golden Dome.

"Habemus 'coachum,' (sic)" he would solemnly intone down to thousands of adoring faithful below.

It all seemed so logical. Meyer, the son of the working class, who toiled on the unforgiving fields of northern Ohio through his prep and collegiate career at Bowling Green and made his way onto coach Lou Holtz's staff in 1995, later working with Holtz's replacement Bob Davie, and knew the campus from Athletic and Convocation Center to Zahm Hall, seemed the classic fit.

The Hollywood script writers would be ready. So too the national media. But today, the producers aren't Cecil B. DeMille/Frank Capra, "It's a Wonderful Life" or "Knute Rockne: All American" types. And that's where the plot took an unthinkable Stephen Kingesque twist.

It was no secret Florida coveted Mr. Meyer's services after a particularly ungraceful firing of coach Ron Zook, whose only real sin wasn't he wasn't Steve Spurrier. A particularly unpalatable chap named Jeremy Foley, U.F.'s curator of its athletic zoo, grabbed a giant editor's pencil, scrawled graffiti through the entire script in the form of a twice-as-big contract offer -- a reported $2 million -- and Mr. Meyer's path took a severe right turn southward to Gainesville.

By Friday's end, Mr. Meyer was clad in Gators Orange and the Irish, whose memories of their fumbling, bumbling coach chase after George O'Leary was found to have doctored his resume, were red with embarrassment.

Rick Telander, a former Northwestern safety and author of "The 100-Yard Lie," a critical study of Division I-A football who also is a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and Sports Illustrated contributor, co-hosts a weekday afternoon talk show on Chicago sports-talk station WSCR-AM, a.k.a. "The Score."

"If you're gonna be a whore, Notre Dame..." he began. You didn't need to need to hear the predicate of that sentence.

So Notre Dame enters a strange new world, one that would rattle the gravestones of the Gipper, Rock, Moose, Father Ned Joyce, and probably Pat O'Brien and "Dutch" Reagan as well.

It is a world of $10 gameday programs, $53 tickets, $50 million T.V. contracts and a jam-packed Hammes Bookstore filled with massively overpriced Notre Dame memorabilia that leaves its shelves almost as quickly as its employees can restock it.

It is a world of bidding wars, of a collective sub 1,000 of S.A.T. mediocrity for its football team as opposed to an average enrolled freshman's 1,360.

When you wake up the echoes these days, it's 2-1 that the sound doing the waking is that of a ringing cash register.

What has happened in three years is this -- Notre Dame has simply lost whatever innocence it possessed, replaced by the unmistakable sound of crinkling dead presidents. In three years, ticket costs have jumped from $38 to $53.

Oh, sure, there'll still be breathtaking fall campus footage of adoring seniors, in their golden years, heading to the grotto for a chance to light a candle for personal intentions ... and just maybe a win over those heathens from Ann Arbor. There'll be thousands along the walkways awaiting the marching band as it pounds out "The Victory March" en route to the Stadium.

Some things will stand the eternal test. And Notre Dame will still be a special place. But bit by bit, the financial oil wells that have turned college football into big business have cast their unseemly shadows across one of America's most beautiful campuses.

The chilling developments -- the shoddy handling of Willingham by the infamous Notre Dame Seven -- Athletic Director Kevin White, Father Malloy, incoming President Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., Provost Nathan Hatch, Executive Vice President John Affleck-Graves, Board of Trustees President Patrick McCartan and Trustees' Chairman of Athletic Committee Philip Purcell, and the aftermath of Meyer's jolting decision could haunt the University of Notre Dame for years to come.

To be fair to White, it was said by more than a few insiders he was not a particularly willing executioner, but the fact his own hide might well have been on the line, shall we say, eased the process somewhat.

As students walked through the quadrangle Friday afternoon, many wore a death-in-the-family look and wondered why us?

While visions of championship gold danced in the heads high-powered booster club yay-hoos in the swampgrass wasteland of north Florida, people of a far larger constiuency were left to contemplate the patience of Job.

"If you look hard at Notre Dame," one of its truest supporters, Paul Hornung, the 1956 Heisman Trophy winner, told "The Score's" afternoon crew, "you'll see we've had our ups and downs. We had Gipper, Knute (Rockne), (Frank) Leahy, and Ara (Parseghian), but we also had (Terry) Brennan and Gerry Faust..."

But Notre Dame football has rarely taken this deep a sustained walk into the valley of defeat. A decade without a bowl victory, a 13-15 record in Willingham's last 28 games. Four straight losses to annoying Notre Dame imitator Boston College.

The Irish, who will play in the Insight Bowl against a Pac-10 lower-level rep at Phoenix's Bank One Ballpark, are in a new game now.

Long gone is the lease to one of the few luxury suites among the collegiate elite. Gone, too, thanks to the 15-minute memories so many bluechip athletes employ, are images of Tony Rice, Rocket Ismail, Ned Bolcar and coach Lou Holtz doing a victory lap around the Fiesta Bowl in 1989 to celebrate their last national championship. The Irish are forced to use the service entrance now while the bigshots above hurl insults and smirk downward.

White this past week called the on-field performance expectations "non-negotiable." Parseghian told "The Score" the new coach had better approach the job with his "Eyes wide open. It's the only way," he admonished.

And now the school has to overcome yet another obstacle, one unimaginable as recently as when Jerome Bettis plowed his way through enemy defenses a decade ago.

Notre Dame, to quote one Chicago prospect, "Has to fight an image of being uncool. The kids today want to know where they can best get ready for the pros. It ain't right, but that's it."

Perhaps more regrettably, it may have to fight a much bigger image that threatens to engulf it far more than the classic football factories like Miami, U.S.C., Florida, Tennessee, L.S.U., Michigan, Ohio State or Oklahoma.

Irrelevance.

God bless the new coach. That Golden Dome he'll see daily as he drives up Notre Dame Avenue sits atop a majestic building. But there will be dark, daunting days where it will resemble the forbidding Matterhorn and the road will seem straight uphill.

In this wholly new era, Notre Dame has some major image rebuilding to do. It's a challenge for the very few. It rests in the hands of the same Notre Dame Seven.

If you're in the neighborhood, the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes is located at the corner of Holy Cross Drive and St. Mary's Road, tucked away in a secluded northwest corner of the main campus.