Bruins Fly Home as Magical Night Turns Into Daze : UCLA: After winning national championship, the players have little emotion left to display upon returning home.

After five days of improbable sunshine and incomparable triumph, April rain bathed UCLA’s departure here Tuesday morning as the Bruins’ well of emotion finally began to run dry.

What was there left for them to feel?

Shuffling through the airport like sleepwalkers, the Bruins could not deny that their national title-winning effort against Arkansas Monday and the hours of revelry with the hundreds of fans who gathered at their hotel had left them dazed and semi-delirious.

“To this moment, I don’t really know what’s going on, I don’t even know what I’m thinking. . . . I’m just along for the ride,” said Final Four most outstanding player Ed O’Bannon, minutes before boarding the charter back to LAX. “Everything is kind of a blur.”

Asked to explain the unexplainable--how did UCLA, playing without its most essential player, point guard Tyus Edney, defeat the Razorbacks, 89-78?--the Bruins shrugged numbly.

“Last night was kind of like a dream, you just couldn’t believe it,” said Edney, who trudged to the gate with a bleary grin never leaving his face. “But it’s starting to sink in a little.”

Coach Jim Harrick, looking tired beyond measurement but obviously still fueled by emotion, saluted his team, the season and the power of Monday night’s accomplishment.

“I’ve had a lot of teams play good, I’ve had a lot of teams stink it up,” Harrick said. “But to have a team play its greatest game when its greatest game was needed is the best feeling anybody could ever have as a coach.

“And they played their hearts out. They played their guts out.”

Though others with the team said they never doubted the Bruins could beat defending champion Arkansas without Edney, who played less than three minutes because of a badly sprained right wrist, Harrick confessed Tuesday that he was not calm.

All Sunday, when Edney’s condition worsened, then into Monday, when it became obvious that Edney could not handle a basketball--forget about shoot it--with his right hand, Harrick said he was in a dark mood.

“I was disconsolate,” he said. “Before the game started and in the locker room before, my assistants were trying to motivate me. They gave me the Willis Reed story.

“And I said, ‘Bull with that, this is reality, man, we’re going out and play the defending national champions in front of a billion people without our big gun.’

“I thought Tyus Edney was the best player in the whole tournament out of 64 teams up until that game--that’s just an opinion, not a fact. And to think that you’ve got to go out there without him. . . . my heart was on the floor.”

But once he took Edney out of the lineup and inserted Cameron Dollar, Harrick said he forgot his anguish and concentrated on the game.

The players say they already had moved on.

“We had a huddle before we went into the game and Cameron was letting everybody know--both he and Ed were saying that Tyus got us here, he’s led us the whole year, and now it’s time to win one for the little fella,” Charles O’Bannon said.

Said Ed O’Bannon: “This team and this game was bigger than one player, any player, and Tyus knew that, we all knew that.

“I think people are going to see this team and see that we overcame a lot. Whether we’re rated in the top with the other championship teams, that to me, is irrelevant. I figured we played as hard as we could, and whatever people think of us in relation with other teams is fine with me.”

So where does this victory and UCLA’s first title since the retirement of John Wooden in 1975, culminating a run of 10 titles in 12 years, put the program?

Harrick paused a bit when asked the question, as if he were not yet prepared for greater reverberations--and greater, Woodenesque expectations.

“I hope it’s a breakthrough, that people understand we’ve got a great, great program,” Harrick said. “The guys are graduating, we’re doing it right. . . . (but it) probably won’t be 10 out of 12 years. I mean, in spite of what everybody wants, we probably won’t do that.

“I’ll tell you what it does, to me, it gives you a kind of pride that you can really build on, and pride is one of the great motivators of having a good program.”

Harrick already has said that next year’s team, even without seniors Edney, Ed O’Bannon and George Zidek, whom Harrick praised for lifting his game in his final two Bruin games, should be an exciting team to coach.

“Youth brings exuberance,” Harrick said of a team that will start no seniors and adds standout recruits Jelani McCoy and Brandon Loyd to a nucleus of Charles O’Bannon, Toby Bailey, Dollar and J.R. Henderson. “They’ll be so eager. And we’re going to build on this too.”

Bailey was the catalyst of the title-winning game with 26 points, nine rebounds and several cathartic dunks, including a left-handed slam off of an offensive rebound with 4:27 left that gave UCLA a 71-65 lead that never got smaller.

For Bailey, whenever this year’s banner is raised to the Pauley Pavilion rafters, it will be the beginning of a new era.

“It’s going to be great,” he said. “We’ll finally get out (from) under the shadow of Wooden’s years.”

When will the banner go up? It’s unclear, though Harrick said he’d like the permanent tribute to be installed before the three seniors depart for professional basketball.

“I hope so,” Ed O’Bannon said. “That’s a sight I always wanted to see, having a huge impact on UCLA is something I always wanted to do.”