Forget the Alamo

UCLA did not fall short Saturday, so much as it finally wore down, tired and tugged by what could have been.

It was too long and too liberating a journey for the Bruins not to mourn its end, too sudden a halt for Coach Steve Lavin not to lapse into pained tears in the aftermath of the 80-72 loss to Minnesota, even as he recounted his team’s recovery from the lowest ebb.

From a November firing to one victory short of the Final Four.

In a melancholy--but not miserable--Bruin locker room, the Bruins said the hardest part was knowing that this season of upheaval and uproarious success was over. That there were no more challenges left to conquer.

Nothing left to do in this sixth-month journey but go home.

“I just wanted to take one more step,” Lavin said, “to feel the thrill of being there, of being around each other for one more week.”

But Minnesota was too strong and too savvy, savagely exploiting the Bruins’ lack of inside depth on its way to a victory in the Midwest Regional final before 31,930.

“The emotion I feel now is hard to put into words,” Minnesota Coach Clem Haskins said.

The No. 1-seeded Golden Gophers, who earned the school’s first Final Four berth, surged back from a 10-point second-half deficit by throwing a wall of hustling, hungry players at the Bruins, whose shot-blocking center, Jelani McCoy, played only 13 minutes because of a chest injury.

With McCoy a non-factor, and 6-foot-9 forward J.R. Henderson in foul trouble, the Gophers scored 46 of their 52 second-half points either on foul shots or on power plays near the basket.

“That was one of the worst feelings I’ve had in my life,” McCoy said. “I’m sitting on the bench, while they’re out there fighting.”

Said Bruin swingman Kris Johnson: “No question we win the game if Jelani’s healthy. But you’ve got to give Minnesota credit, they exploited that. They just kept pounding it inside on us.”

In the decisive 23-10 Minnesota run that turned UCLA’s 42-32 lead into a Gopher 55-52 advantage with 7:33 left in the game, 21 of those Gopher points came in the paint.

And for the first time in 13 games, the Bruins, despite 22 points from Charles O’Bannon and 21 points and nine rebounds from Toby Bailey, could not find their way through to victory.

“Without our big guys, we were left to shooting three-pointers and jumpers, and that’s not our game,” Bailey said. “That’s not why we’ve been killing people.

“We’ve been the team that usually ends it by pounding it inside to J.R. and Jelani, getting the easy baskets down the stretch. We couldn’t get them today.

“If we have Jelani, it’s totally different.”

Though the Bruins tied the score, 57-57, with 5:08 left, the Gophers kept dumping it inside, and Quincy Lewis (15 points), Courtney James (12 points) and Charles Thomas (14 points) kept finishing the play with slams and free throws.

Then, Minnesota All-American guard Bobby Jackson, voted the regional’s most valuable player after scoring 18 points and grabbing nine rebounds, buried six free throws down the stretch to make UCLA’s final, desperate charge (to within 76-70 with 37 seconds left) inconsequential.

With McCoy out, that left Lavin basically with five players--plus a couple of quick stints by Brandon Loyd and Bob Myers--to match up against Minnesota’s depth.

UCLA, which built its lead with suffocating defense, could only watch as the lead grew to five, then to six and finally to eight, 72-64, with 1:19 remaining.

“That’s when I realized it’s going to be over, and that hurt, because they haven’t ever quit, they never quit once, and you’re looking in their eyes and they’ve kind of surrendered,” Lavin said. “But they surrendered fighting their fannies off.

“You feel responsible for everybody in the basketball family, and you wish you could’ve helped find a way to win.”

The tears, he said, were part of this pent-up season.

“It’s probably overdue,” Lavin said. “It’s been five months since [Jim] Harrick was fired, and since then we’ve just been trying to work hard and come together.

“Today, it ended.”

But, after a few minutes to absorb the result, which dropped UCLA to 24-8, the Bruin players said that however much this loss frustrated them, they would never look back on 1997 as a failure.

“This has definitely been a special season,” O’Bannon said. “Just to see how much this team has grown, even before the [season-opening] Tulsa game, all the way to this game, and everything in between.

“We lost our coach, and to see all of my boys growing up, from boys to men, it’s extremely satisfying.”

Last season, UCLA ended the defense of its 1995 national title by losing in the first round to Princeton, and pouted its way through the next few hours, days and months.

This time, the locker room was entirely different, Johnson said, emblematic of a season that was dramatically different than any that had come before it.

“Last year, everybody was kind of mad at each other,” Johnson said. “This year, it’s totally different. We’re all just proud of everybody on this team. I know I can hold my head up high.

“It’s been a year where we’ve been at such a low point, and we all climbed out of it, holding hands, and we got this far. It was a great run. we’re not mad, we’re proud of the way we handled Coach Harrick getting fired. We showed what we were really made of.”

Lavin said he would console himself, as always with the positive, “by trying to concentrate on the glass being half full, and remembering how special this group of guys are. By remembering all the things they overcame. By not concentrating on losing the game.”

To break the silence of the locker room after the Bruins had filed off the floor with the Gophers celebrating, Cameron Dollar, UCLA’s emotional leader, spoke up, again.

“I just told them, don’t ever forget the things we learned this year as a team,” Dollar said, “all we’ve done this season, all the growth and development from 14 individuals to one team, to see us come from the lowest point to be in the position to go to the Final Four.

“And that didn’t have anything to do with talent or anything like that, it was because we came together as a team, and that’s something I don’t want them ever to forget.”