How can I restore the contacts on my iPhone 4s (from iTunes) without 'syncing' my phone?

I just got a new iPhone 4s about a month ago - backed everything up to iTunes before transferring onto my new phone, which worked great. However, my mail was not working correctly (gmail), and after trying to set it up multiple times, found out about the whole issue of gmail not supporting 'push' with the iphone anymore... Got that issue figured out, but part of trying to set up my gmail account found me syncing my contacts with my gmail contacts.
I have not kept gmail contacts up to date for a few years, and when my phone synced with google contacts, it basically wiped out all of my current contacts and replaced with outdated contacts from google. I know that my contacts should all be saved to iTunes, but I'm afraid to sync and have the same thing happen again. I don't want to restore my phone from iTunes if I don't have to, because I don't want to lose other things outside of my contacts that I've updated since the last time I backed up my phone.
Is there a way to restore just my contacts? I've got a lot of contact info/numbers over the years that would be very difficult to replace, and I don't fully understand the 'sync' process... Thanks for any help!

Syncing contacts is bi-directional. If you elect to sync contacts...again, selected on the Info pane in iTunes...whatever contacts you have in whatever supported application on your computer will be merged with what you have on your phone. If whatever application, on your computer, is empty, then all contacts on your phone will be erased. Never sync to an empty application.
Contacts are included in the iPhone backup, but the first thing done when you perform a sync is an iPhone backup. This means that whatever contacts are currently in your iPhone backup will be overwritten with whatever is currently on your phone.
So, if all you want are whatever contacts are currently in your iPhone backup, you need to re-read my initial post.

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