Any high school football coach worth his salt knows the expression “No pain, no gain.”

Maybe that will emerge as the moral of this whole global credit mess, a self-inflicted crisis caused essentially by lenders who, for a while at least, raked in profits lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back.

The flip side of that coin is that borrowers were only too happy to bury themselves in debt during an era of instant gratification not seen perhaps since the waning days of the Roman Empire.

But all of that has come to an abrupt end.

As a nation, we seem to be transitioning out of crisis mode and into the pain phase. We can only hope there are gains ahead.

Consider that credit card companies are dramatically scaling back the credit they are extending to consumers.

Through the end of April, lenders had issued 9.8 million new credit cards, a 38% decline from the same period a year ago, according to a recent report in USA Today.

Analysts attribute the falloff to a very simple concept: banks have regained some sense of which borrowers are likely to pay back loans and which borrowers are not.

It all really boils down to common sense, said Gail Cunningham, spokeswoman for the non-profit National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

“What happened to us?” she asked, rhetorically. “Were we all taking an extended nap?”

All of America participated in the equivalent of an extended sugar rush brought on by the seemingly endless availability of credit. It seemed nothing was too expensive and the money never really had to be paid back.

At the crux of this fallacy was the notion that real estate would continue to rise at astronomical rates, a dynamic that would cover everyone’s debts from credit cards to car notes to home equity loans.

“People seemed to be comfortable getting themselves deeply into debt and living beyond their means, but it has been to all of our demise,” said Cunningham.

Not least the credit card companies themselves, all of which are facing devastating losses the result of escalating default rates by borrowers who are facing job layoffs, sharply higher mortgage payments and an uncertain economic future.

“The issuers now are on the ropes in part from extending credit to risky borrowers,” Cunningham observed. “They built portfolios based on lending money to risky borrowers” and it’s proven disastrous.

Here’s the really painful part. Now even those with good credit histories are finding it difficult to borrow money, whether it be for a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card. An example of this tightening is that the average limit on a new credit card is down 3% this year to $4,594. 

This is despite the fact that the government has poured billions of dollars into the financial system in an effort to grease the wheels that move the credit markets.

But are tighter lending restrictions a bad thing?

Not in the long-term, said Gary Thurber with the Consumer Credit Counseling Services of Central New York.

“We had the boom a decade ago, but basically it was a false high. We all knew that the bubble would burst at some point because it was all built on borrowing. We were all mortgaging our futures to get what we wanted now. Long-term it was very short sighted,” he said.

All of this behavior was encouraged by the banks and various other lending companies that made money making all these risky loans. 

These are the same institutions that are now reining in their lending practices.

Macro-economists note that less credit means less spending, which will make it more difficult for the U.S. to dig out of the recession, now well into its second year. After all, consumer spending comprises more than 70% of the U.S. economy.

So maybe the economy will have to suffer a while longer while U.S. consumers learn how to borrow and spend more responsibly, and the new frugality on the part of the credit card companies will play a significant role in teaching this lesson to Americans.

“This will be a good thing for those who have taken on too much credit card debt,” said Thurber. “As these people pay down debt, hopefully they’ll see the need to create more savings, and I’ve never heard of anyone who complained that they had too much savings when things got difficult.”

Thurber acknowledged that the most obvious down side to tighter lending practices will be a longer recovery period because consumers will have less discretionary funds to spend.  And on a smaller scale but no less significantly, many Americans living on the margins will find themselves without emergency funds for car repairs, medical bills or unexpected travel.

But Thurber sees a silver lining to the short-term pain of tighter lending restrictions 

“The pendulum swung too far one way and now it’s swung in the other direction,” he said. “Eventually it will come back to a middle ground where the country and consumers can function well.”

Meanwhile, some hard lessons have hopefully been learned both by the lenders and the borrowers. 

Lesson number one for borrowers, according to Thurber: “There’s no substitute for personal responsibility.”