PALO ALTO, Calif. — It was a chance for Washington to prove it had finally returned to both the conference and national conversations, but Saturday’s 34-14 loss at Stanford made the Huskies look a lot like their 2008 selves.

Sure, the Huskies upset USC two weeks ago, and yes, they got their first win in nearly two years the week before that, but after getting everybody’s hopes up for some miracle bowl-season turnaround, it has become clear that this UW team has a lot of work to do.

But it was only last week, after their win against USC, when head coach Steve Sarkisian bragged a little bit about the fact that he said it wouldn’t take long to return the program to respectability.

“We said early on that it wasn’t going to take us very long, and I firmly believe that,” Sarkisian said last week. “I firmly believe that it’s not going to take us very long. We’ve got a very good football team that knows how to prepare and play hard.”

Well, it didn’t look like that against Stanford.

It looks like it’s going to take a little longer to gain real respect in the conference, and it definitely looked like the Huskies weren’t really playing that hard against the Cardinal.

The UW defense allowed the Cardinal to rush for 332 yards, 200 of them by the brute-of-a-running-back Toby Gerhart. And while they did a fair job protecting the pass, 332 yards on the ground is pretty much unacceptable.

“I’m hurt,” linebacker Donald Butler said. “I feel we let down our fans, and as a team, we let down ourselves, most importantly, because we know we can play better than that.”

The Huskies better hope Butler is right that they can play better because, otherwise, they’ll have a bit longer to go before they return to respectability.

Ranked 106th in the nation in rushing defense, allowing nearly 200 yards per game, the Huskies reek like 2008, and their pass efficiency defense isn’t much better. They rank 76th in that stat.

It’s been clear that the Huskies have improved over last year, but they’re still amazingly inconsistent.

Sarkisian and defensive coordinator Nick Holt have talked about how they have changed the attitude in the locker room and have given the team new life, but that isn’t enough.

It was enough for the first three games — mainly because we just weren’t sure what the “new” Huskies would look like.

But after the rather stunning loss to Stanford, it’s time for the Huskies to show whether they can hang with conference competition week in and week out. To do that, they’ll need to be more consistent on defense.

They aren’t going to win many more games this year if they continue on this path, but at least the coaches have been preaching improvement to their players, something the Huskies will need to do in order to make a bowl game.

“We’ll learn from [the Stanford loss],” Holt said. “Our younger guys will learn from it and so will our older guys, and we’ll come back.”

Reach columnist Allen Wagner at sports@dailyuw.com.