Without Webber, New Era Begins : College basketball: The load now falls on Rose to carry a team that suddenly has a 6-6 power forward and a novice point guard.

Innocently, a Michigan sophomore basketball player named Dugan Fife attempted some history. About the Duke-Michigan rivalry, which will be renewed today at Crisler Arena. “Well,” he said, “it all started back when the Fab Five were freshmen . . . “

Whoa . . . When the Fab Five were freshmen? That was when, about the same time Tom Harmon, ol’ 98, was winning the Heisman Trophy? Or when Cazzie Russell was one of the Fabbers? Hey: Two years ago. Please. The Fab Five were baggy-shorted freshmen two . . . years . . . ago. “Seems like it was just the other day,” said Ray Jackson, one of them. He’s a junior now.

They’re all juniors. Except Chris Webber, who’s a Warrior, and a wealthy one at that. “We talk on the phone every day,” said Jalen Rose. “I call collect.” Webber, Rose, Jackson, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King. The Fab Five. Two Final Fours, two national title games, one bad timeout. And gone. Really gone.

“We’re starting anew here,” said Michigan Coach Steve Fisher. “And in a sense, that’s good.”

It’s a curious piece of arithmetic at work. You take five, subtract one and get . . . zero? But in a sense, it’s very real and very correct. “The Fab Five Era is over,” Rose said. “Those were a great two years, and if I could do it over again, I’d do the same thing. But it’s over.”

They were the most compelling college basketball phenomenon of the last quarter-century, going all the way back to John Wooden, who coached in another age altogether. Not as good as Duke’s dynasty, but more unpredictable. Less reliable than North Carolina, but more interesting. A little like Phi Slamma Jamma, but with more ESPN and more to say. They made long shorts, trash talk and fierce precocity fashionable.

“If you loved basketball, you loved the Fab Five,” said Rose, then and still the soul of the group. It was a running plot through two seasons, best recruiting class ever. Five kids good enough to start for a major program, confident enough to speak their minds and publicized enough to be typecast. Villains by the time they were sophomores. Saddled, also, with enormous expectations before any of them was 20.

So there is a bittersweet appropriateness to Michigan (5-0, ranked No. 3) playing Duke (4-0, No. 4) today because Duke so often measured the Fab Five’s growth. The freshmen were legitimized in December 1991 when they nearly beat the defending national champion Blue Devils here and they were exposed as youths when Duke ran them out of the Metrodome in March of 1992, 71-51, in the NCAA final.

And a year ago, when they met Dec. 5 in Cameron Indoor Stadium, when Michigan talked up the rematch (Recall: Webber said he’d rather have Rose than Bobby Hurley, etc.) and got spanked, 79-68. “That’s when we really got painted with black hats on,” Fisher said. “I felt very bad about that.”

In a sense, they were never what they appeared to be. “But you’re never who you are,” Fisher said. “You’re who you’re perceived to be.”

Perception: Arrogant trashmouth prima donnas.

Closer to the truth: Bright, interesting, passionate teen-agers who competed like mad and had fun with it. We might never have really understood that, but now that Webber is gone, the game becomes more difficult and some of the confidence is stripped away.

As a practical matter, a huge two-way force is missing. “We don’t have Chris down there to block all the shots,” Jackson said. So the entire dynamic shifts. “Now we’re workmanlike, steady, good defenders,” Fisher said. “All the adjectives that I feel could have been applied last year, but never were.”

Too much about the trash talk. About the black socks. The bald heads.

At the center of the shift is Rose, the slender, 6-foot-9 guard who was Webber’s best friend. The changes in the Michigan program have touched him profoundly. Webber is gone. Assistant coach Perry Watson, who coached Rose in high school and joined him as an assistant at Michigan, is now the head coach at Detroit Mercy.

So the load falls on Rose, asking him to grow up and also to carry a team that suddenly has a 6-6 power forward (Jackson) and a novice point guard (Fife).

“I was always kind of used to being able to lean left . . . and then lean right,” Rose said, speaking of Watson and Webber. “That way, you take a lot of pressure off yourself, because you surround yourself with such good people. It’s a different situation now. My life hasn’t changed, but I’m older now, more mature.”

Jackson said, “Every time you throw an obstacle in his face, he finds a way to get over it. He’s a fighter. On the court, he’s the toughest player I’ve ever seen, mentally.”

It was Rose who always seemed to be in the middle of Fab Five controversies. Best trash-talker. Baggiest shorts. Technical fouls for smiling too much (even got one this year against Tulane for laughing, which is sort of a progression). Last February he had to explain his presence at a crack house during a drug sweep. Helping a friend, he said, and people who know him say that is absolutely the truth.

All of it left him smarter and just a little scarred. “There was a lot of publicity about guys’ personal lives,” Rose said. “ They criticized us for wearing baggy shorts. Now everybody wears baggy shorts. They criticized us for talking trash. Now you hear guys on TV saying, ‘So-and-so is a real cocky player.’

“I was thinking back the other day,” Rose said. “Times are changing. We helped do that.”

It’s fitting that Duke comes here today with a young team framed around senior Grant Hill and junior Cherokee Parks. And that Michigan will start four juniors. “Sort of a conversion,” Rose said. “But don’t let them fool you. They’re an experienced team. First time we played them, we were freshmen.”

With a nudge from Fisher, Michigan players have refrained from trashing anybody this week. No dumping on Parks. No dissing Antonio Lang. It smells a little like growing up with age and a little like being beaten down by criticism. Maybe both. Either way, Michigan lost the NCAA title game a year ago on Webber’s timeout-technical, but this doesn’t feel like the stereotypical team in search of retribution. It feels like a different team altogether.

“The Fab Five lives no more,” said Fisher, not happy and not sad. “That chapter is closed.”