Though it's only September, four football players at the University of Southern California already have created an impression that's likely to last all year.

Bernard Riley, Steve Stevenson, Malcolm Wooldridge and Kyle Matthews assisted a young woman who had had a grisly accident, perhaps saving her life.

And while those actions won't be touted on a scoreboard or preserved in a records book, Danielle Dauenhauer, a Southern California sophomore, isn't likely to forget them any time soon.

A few weeks ago, Dauenhauer was in the process of hanging a poster on her wall in her second-story apartment. Her window-height bed provided a handy stepping stool for the task -- until she fell backward through the nearby open window and through the screen. Instead of landing on her head, Dauenhauer came to a stop, dangling upside down and impaled on wrought-iron security bars.

"I thought, 'Wait a minute, why am I not on the ground?' Then I felt the pain and started screaming," she said.

The football players were sitting in a nearby first-floor apartment, and when they heard her scream they ran to see what had happened. The sight was shocking. Dauenhauer was impaled upside-down, about six feet off the ground, by metal spikes lodged in her buttocks.

"It didn't look real," said Stevenson, a sophomore wide receiver. "We all kind of went into shock."

But the shock didn't prevent them from acting. Riley, a sophomore defensive tackle, and Wooldridge, a freshman defensive tackle, reached up and held her by her shoulders, preventing the bars from sliding farther into her.

Stevenson and Matthews, a freshman safety, helped keep Dauenhauer calm, and they also kept away onlookers.

No one is sure just how long Riley and Wooldridge held her up, but they had begun to feel the effects of a long practice earlier in the day. They took turns at the strenuous task, which was no easy feat as it required lifting their arms as high as their heads to reach Dauenhauer's shoulders. Still, they couldn't bear the thought of the iron bars sliding deeper into the woman's body.

"She was screaming right into my face, and I'm trying to tell her everything was all right," Riley said. "But I didn't know how much more I could take.

"It was just instinct; the same things you use in football. You see something happen and you react."

Aware that shock was just as much of a danger as the bars themselves, the players also tried to calm her, at one point even fibbing to her about whether she was bleeding.

"We released some of the pressure for her, tried to calm her down," Stevenson said. "We all tried to make sure she didn't go into shock."

The players held Dauenhauer until firefighters arrived with bolt cutters to free her from the bars. Dauenhauer, with the bars still imbedded four inches inside her body, was taken to a hospital where the bars were removed. She returned to campus the next week, hobbling-- but walking-- and thanked her rescuers.

"Just doing what anybody would do," Riley told her.

Perhaps this one will make it into the record books after all .