co.combinatorics - Combinatorial proof that large-girth graphs are sparse?

Theorem. Fix $epsilon > 0$; for sufficiently large n, any graph with n vertices and $epsilon binom{n}{2}$ edges contains many (nondegenerate) cycles of length 4.

The proof is simple; put an indicator variable $delta_{x, y}$ for each pair of vertices corresponding to whether or not there is an edge there; then start with

$n^8 epsilon^4 = (sum delta_{x, y})^4$

and apply Cauchy-Schwarz twice; finally, note that there are $O(n^3)$ "degenerate 4-cycles".

A basic corollary of this is the following fact:

Corollary. Any graph with girth at least 5 and n vertices has $o(n^2)$ edges.

This seems like it should be possible to prove without resorting to "analytic" machinery like Cauchy-Schwarz; indeed, it seems like it should be weak enough to prove almost by arguing "locally." But none of the obvious lines of reasoning seem to provide a proof.

Is it possible to get a good bound on the density of large-girth graphs without using Cauchy-Schwarz or equivalent?

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