Bruins Get Losing Off Their Chests : College basketball: After a bumpy two-game stretch, Ed O’Bannon sparks a 103-88 victory over Stanford.

Let the good times roll, UCLA said Saturday afternoon at Pauley Pavilion, where the Bruins returned to those thrilling days of a month or so ago and crunched Stanford like a team caught between one of those chest bumps by the O’Bannon brothers.

Sure enough, there were gobs of good will, not to mention several sighs of relief after UCLA scored a 103-88 victory to end a two-game losing streak.

“We’re moving on,” Tyus Edney said.

All it took was a semi-rout of a team that lost its best player on fouls with 12:01 left in a nine-point game. But, hey, who cares? Certainly not the Bruins, who after four losses in eight games had been studying their own shortcomings long enough.

No, Saturday was a time for dunks and blocked shots and fast breaks and sharp passes, not to mention a couple of perfectly executed chest bumps celebrated by Ed and Charles O’Bannon.

But there was more to Ed O’Bannon’s game than possibly bruising his sternum. He scored his season-high of 28 points and 19 rebounds in 35 minutes of the type of aggressive play that has seems to have been lost for a while.

“When Ed O’Bannon plays basketball the way he can, we are a lot different basketball team,” Bruin Coach Jim Harrick said.

As it is, the Bruins are 19-4, 12-3 in the Pacific 10 Conference and hoping that Arizona trips up sometime soon and that they don’t.

More than anyone else, O’Bannon made sure the Bruins wouldn’t stumble against the Cardinal, 7-7 in the Pac-10, and reduced at this stage of the season to spoiling things for somebody else.

“You guys are so hard on UCLA down here,” Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery told reporters afterward. “It’s incredible. They’ll be fine.”

Maybe so, and if UCLA does continue on its winning ways, then it’s probably going to be up to Ed O’Bannon to keep things on a roll.

“He is our key,” center George Zidek said.

O’Bannon couldn’t have been much better, although he probably would tell you it’s a lot easier going against 6-foot-7 Andy Poppink of Stanford than, say, Lamond Murray of Cal, as he had to do last time out.

Anyway, O’Bannon did what he is supposed to do, which is to show everybody else the way. Edney knew before the game that O’Bannon had it together.

“You could see it in his eyes he was ready to play,” Edney said.

O’Bannon already had 15 points and eight rebounds at the half, but UCLA’s lead was only 43-40. Stanford was still hanging close, trailing by 57-53 when the game changed for good.

Charles O’Bannon scored on a 15-footer from the right baseline, hurried Brent Williams into a miss, then dropped in a layup on a breakaway, assisted by Edney.

Shon Tarver’s three-pointer made the score 64-55 when Knight poked Edney for his fourth foul. It was 68-59 after a Knight drive through the middle when Knight picked up his fifth foul, chopping Edney in the lane.

Knight was gone. As the O’Bannons playfully pointed Knight toward the bench, Stanford’s hopes went with him. Soon it was 80-67 on a rebound basket by Ed O’Bannon, then the Bruins withstood a six-possession scoreless streak because Stanford did not manage a point in the same span.

Tarver’s three-point play after an offensive rebound and yet another breakaway, this one finished by Ed O’Bannon, and the score was 85-69 with 4:39 to go.

It was over. Besides breaking out a seldom-seen full-court press, from then on the Bruins spent most of their time perfecting the art of fouling while Stanford majored in missing free throws.

Zidek, Cameron Dollar and Charles O’Bannon fouled out for the Bruins, but it didn’t matter much because Stanford missed 21 of 46 free throws.

Montgomery wanted to find someone to blame.

“Who’s the free throw coach?” he said.

In the meantime, Harrick and his staff became the mental coaches. They had put together a highlight film of early season romps, then contrasted it to how the Bruins had been playing recently.

“We weren’t playing the way the team was early in the season,” Ed O’Bannon said. “It was very frustrating.

“We were hugging and jumping around and high-fiving. But we saw it was us. It was our team. We just wanted to get back to it.”