Where do Huskies go after losing four straight games by a total of 26 points?

So how do you come back from this? How can the Huskies possibly recover from a month unlike any other in the program’s history?

Yes, Washington has had months when it has gone winless. Heck, the UW hasn’t won a game in October since Oct. 9, 2004, a stretch of 11 games. But it has never had anything like this.

Four losses, all close, two in overtime. The Huskies went 0-4 in October this year, and lost the games by a combined 26 points. Since Washington began playing football in 1889, it has never lost four games in a row by fewer combined points. The last time there was anything close to this was in 1958, when the Huskies lost four straight by 37 points. The 1920 team lost four by a combined 27, and in 1907 the UW had a four-game losing streak with a combined margin of 29 points.

It’s been made clear in the past that Washington isn’t choosing to focus on the positive of nearly winning, even after winning a combined three games over the last two years. No, the Huskies say it doesn’t matter if they lose by one point or 30.

“A loss is a loss,” senior linebacker Scott White said. “We can’t lose sight of that. We’ve got to focus and make the corrections we need to make and get to the root of the problem. We can’t dwell on the fact that we lost by a point, or three points, or overtime. We have to understand that we lost and we have to bounce back.”

But there’s no question that the pain is just a little deeper when a win is within reach only to have it slip away. And when you see your season begin to fade away at the same time, well, the disappointment reaches grave levels.

Washington coach Tyrone Willingham said it all comes down to attitude.

“The key is, it depends on what you want,” Willingham said after Saturday’s loss to Arizona State. “Our football team has to want more than this afternoon. If we desire more, we’ll get more.”

Maybe, but not this year. Though mathematically Washington still has a shot at a bowl game, realistically, it’s probably not going to happen, a fact made all the more disappointing because the Huskies at one point were 4-1. Now they’re 4-5, in eighth place in the Pacific-10 with three games remaining, and two of them are on the road.

They might have to play without their starting running back or their top two quarterbacks and now have the added pressure of having to find a way to win a close game after losing four narrow ones in a row. Make no mistake, that plays on your mind. You begin to question yourself, your teammates, your coaches. You wonder if anything you do will result in a win, or if everything simply is against you. The defense cranky at the ineffective offense and the offense gets upset with the cranky defense.

That’s what a losing streak can do, especially a streak that so easily could have gone the other way. A fast start here, a strong finish there, and the Huskies might be talking about who their bowl game opponent would be.

Instead, Washington now must fight the urge to allow what already is a snowball become an avalanche. This can still be a successful season, with or without a bowl game. I know it’s not what long-time Husky fans want to hear, but for as low as this program has been, five or six wins can be a good year and a good way to go into next season. But for that to happen, the Huskies have to find a way to get through what must be a terrible feeling of loss and get back the attitude that permeated from the team earlier in the season.

“Losing is really draining more than anything,” White said. “We’re all going to be disappointed about the fact that we lost. Not the fashion that we lost in or the fact that we came back. We expected to win and we didn’t get that done.”

“I think our football team has shown an amazing resiliency,” Willingham said. “Some people would question if we could come back after USC and I think we played good football to a degree. There were some people who questioned if we could come back after Oregon State. We came back and played good football. And people wondered about last week, coming out of California, and we came back, struggled early, found a fight and came back. So we’ve got our backs against the wall, we’ve got a tough place to go on the road in a week. We’ve got to muster up the fight to get it done.”