END OF AN ERA: DONAHUE RESIGNS : Between the lines ofBruin Notebooks : Impressions: Times writers who have covered UCLA over the years share a few insights into the coach they so often had to interview.

It’s probably going to take a while to watch the UCLA football team run onto the field of the Rose Bowl and not see Terry Donahue right there in step with the players.

For 20 years, it was pretty much the same vision. Perpetually tanned. Sandy-blond hair. Knit shirts. Sometimes in a light jacket and sometimes behind sunglasses. He donned shorts for a game for the first time in the opener at the Rose Bowl against Miami.

As it turned out, it was the first game of Donahue’s last season at UCLA. We just didn’t know it then.

What we do know about Donahue is that he coached the game with a certain dignity and in his own style. He was conservative enough never to say anything that might get put on someone’s bulletin board, and liberal enough to come up with enough trick plays--even if they almost always occurred when he was an underdog--to stretch down the sidewalk from the campus to Wilshire Boulevard.

Some might argue that he coached best as an underdog. It was a position in which he did his best work, learned as a 175-pound walk-on defensive tackle and through more than 20 years of battling USC for the city’s love and affection, not to mention recruits.

The picture of Donahue at UCLA is not only his numbers, which have been laid out for everyone to see. For the reporters who covered his teams and wrote stories about him, there always has been more to Donahue than meets the eye.

But that’s a good place to start, now that Donahue is suddenly just as interested in test patterns as post patterns. Here are some Times writers’ recollections: