SPECIAL REPORT / Final Four /...

More than 1,000 miles down the coast, in a Westwood building on a campus of concrete and trees, history hangs from the rafters.

Draped from the Pauley Pavilion ceiling, 11 pieces of the UCLA dream are a silent, constant, urgent acknowledgment of the success Bruin basketball has had.

Ten blue and gold banners representing NCAA titles, another for the NIT championship. The number could soon grow to an even dozen. But only if the Bruins continue winning.

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Coach Jim Harrick, when asked if the administration would put up a Final Four banner if his team should lose either tonight or Monday. “I wouldn’t think they’d do that.”

Right, said Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis. “You only put them up when you win championships.”

So the last leg of the quest begins today, against upstart Oklahoma State at the Kingdome. In a season in which the Bruins have achieved their preliminary goals, the only one left is to win a national championship.

That means winning today, against Eddie Sutton’s hard-edged Cowboys, then again Monday night against the winner of the North Carolina-Arkansas matchup. Nothing less will do.

“If you practice in Pauley Pavilion for four years, when you look up and see those banners there, they are there for good,” senior center George Zidek said.

“They’re going to be there for all time. I was just talking about this with Tyus (Edney), how great it would be to put up a banner. It’d be there forever.”

Freshman forward J.R. Henderson said, “It hasn’t really hit me yet, but the coach said we could have our own banner up there. I looked and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’d be nice.’

“People come here every game and look up there and say, ‘Well, Kareem was on this team, and Bill Walton was on that team.’ It’d be nice if people could say that about us.”

For the seniors, who have been through much harder times than these and have treated the media blitz of the last few days with casual grace and understanding, the feelings are more immediate.

Ed O’Bannon, Edney and Zidek already have a place in the UCLA tradition. Winning UCLA’s first national championship since 1975 would merely get them a higher one.

“Maybe 20 years from now, how we talk about Marques Johnson and Bill Walton and Lew Alcindor,” O’Bannon said, “20 years from now, maybe people can talk about Tyus Edney and George Zidek and Ed O’Bannon.

“That’d be pretty sweet.”

The UCLA players, who seem to have relaxed since fighting their way through the West Regional to the school’s first Final Four since 1980--which ended with a loss to Louisville in the title game--say they feel no real burden.

By winning the Pacific 10 championship, by reeling off 17 consecutive victories since losing to California in the last game of January, by playing with poise and a sense of drama, the Bruins feel successful, no matter how the Seattle adventure turns out.

“I don’t feel an obligation,” Edney said. “But I know I want to be on the team that hangs another banner up there.”

The pressure is past, the players say. The pressure was involved in getting here.

“Before this, the coaches were like a nervous wreck,” Henderson said. “It showed a lot, I think, in all the coaches. They were like, ‘J.R., you’ve got to go out and play hard, you’ve got to do all this stuff, you’ve got to come to play.’

“It was kind of strange. They’ve never acted like that to me before. That’s when I knew it was time to play.”

Against Oklahoma State, which fought its way through higher-seeded teams in the East Region to get here, the Bruins (29-2) are clearly expecting a possession-by-possession battle, not unlike their struggle with Missouri in the second round.

The Cowboys, who pound the ball down low on offense to 7-foot center Bryant (Big Country) Reeves, the Big Eight player of the year, and get outside punch from senior guard Randy Rutherford, have won seven in a row.

Oklahoma State (27-9) held Drexel to 25.4% field-goal shooting in the first round, Alabama to 36.1% in the second round, No. 1-seeded Wake Forest to 40.7% in the third round and No. 2 Massachusetts to 27.6% in the regional final.

“Rutherford and Reeves have carried this ballclub offensively all season,” said Sutton, who took Arkansas to the Final Four in 1978. “And over the last five weeks, some of our players have stepped forward on different nights and they’ve given them some help.

“But the thing that’s really carried us overall during this stretch has been our defense. Our defense has allowed us to stay in every ballgame.”

Other than Reeves and Rutherford--who has an all-round game that the Bruins compare to NBA All-Star Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors--5-foot-11 point guard Andre Owens, who has a tournament-leading 12 steals, is a key.

Edney, who will match up with Owens, says that despite Oklahoma State’s relatively low profile, UCLA knows how dangerous the Cowboys can be.

“It won’t matter how you look at it, doesn’t matter what their name is, they’re in the Final Four, and they’ve obviously done something right to get to the Final Four,” Edney said. “They just come out and take care of business.”

And if UCLA can get past the Cowboys, the Bruins will move to within one game of immortalizing themselves on high in Pauley Pavilion.

“Once I started learning about the tradition, I saw how everybody was so excited about the past and my attitude was, ‘I want to bring that back,’ ” sophomore guard Cameron Dollar said. “I want people to be excited about us, now. That’s how I want it to be around here now.

“That’s the only way I ever really thought about the Wooden days.”