Pasadena Pilgrimage

By some accounts, it began Oct. 20, 1996, a day after one of the worst experiences of their football lives.

Others talk about late June, when all the preseason football magazines came out, all of them with Washington picked to win the Pacific 10 Conference title, some of them touting the Huskies as national champions.

The company line is that it wasn’t until Nov. 1, after Stanford had been beaten and the Bruins were 7-2, 5-1 in the Pac-10.

But nobody really believes that.

Everyone at UCLA has a particular time when he started preparing for today’s game against Washington.

“After what happened last year . . . ,” begins linebacker Brian Willmer, who has a lasting memory of running back Corey Dillon’s helmet in his face last October in Seattle.

For all of the arithmetic involved in a conference race, it’s personal when you get on a plane after a 41-21 beating in which most of your team’s 21 points were scored in garbage time, after Dillon had done his damage.

“They dominated us,” Willmer says quietly. “They ran at will.”

Most of the old-timers at Washington take a more cosmic view.

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The numbers are as easy--and as hard--as 1-2-3:

1. UCLA must beat Washington.

2. The Bruins must also beat USC next week.

3. Washington must beat Washington State.

One plus two plus three equal the Rose Bowl for UCLA.

For Washington, it’s as simple as a 1-2 punch:

1. Beat UCLA.

2. Beat Washington State.

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That kind of knockout gives closure to those Huskies who as freshmen trooped into a team room on an August day more than four years ago and heard their coach, Don James, say, “I’m going to resign.”

They watched seniors cry and saw running back Napoleon Kaufman take off his national championship ring and throw it across the room in anger and frustration.

They could have left, but all stayed and 13 of them are seniors now and have been through Pac-10 sanctions that cut 20 scholarships for a time and limited recruiting. One-two, and they are in the Rose Bowl and all of that is bitter history.

Brock Huard saw it coming Jan. 1, 1995, when he was at home, about to watch Oregon play Penn State in the Rose Bowl game and flip-flopping between scholarship offers to play quarterback at Washington and UCLA.

Just before kickoff, he made up his mind and called Coach Jim Lambright.

“I believe I said, ‘I’ve kind of made up my mind, Coach,’ ” Huard says. “ ‘And I was just wondering when we’re going to be in the Rose Bowl.’

“And he said, ‘Did you say, “We?” ’ “

“And I said, ‘Yeah.’ ”

Lambright hung up and lifted a glass to the future. That future is now.

“If you can’t get excited about playing this game, you don’t belong in college football,” says Huard, who is a redshirt sophomore now but remembers the trying time well because his brother, Damon, was the team’s quarterback then.

Their problem, not ours, says UCLA receiver-punt returner Eric Scott, who has his own bone to pick with the past.

“It’s the biggest game I’ve played here, and I figure I’m owed,” he says. “I’ve missed out on two Rose Bowls.

“UCLA recruited me when we went to the Rose Bowl in 1993, and I missed that because I went to Northwestern.

“Then I transferred to UCLA and missed out when Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl. I should have had two Rose Bowl rings.”

He has none, and, as a senior, this is his last chance.

That’s the quest for the seniors, who have beaten USC and seen the Trojans playing in Pasadena on Jan. 1, who figure they should have beaten Arizona State last season, only to end up watching the Sun Devils play in the Rose Bowl.

“I thought I’d have had a ring by now,” receiver Jim McElroy says. “I want one.”

The hype and hoopla that will generate the season’s biggest crowd at the Rose Bowl is all gravy to Bruin Coach Bob Toledo.

In his second season as UCLA’s boss, he finds himself torn between reality and simply enjoying the whole thing.

“We’re ahead of schedule,” he says. “I felt we’d show some progress from last year, but I didn’t feel we’d get so much national attention, like we’re getting now. If we were a 6-5 team and going to a bowl, that would have been progress.

“You know, we’re ranked ninth in the nation [Washington is 13th], and I didn’t think we’d be a top-10 team this early. I thought we’d be much more competitive, which we have been, but I didn’t figure we’d have a seven-game win streak. I didn’t know if we could compete for the Pac-10 championship this year. I was hoping all this would happen, but I didn’t really know that it would.”

He has had an extra week to deal with Washington because UCLA moved its scheduled ninth game against Washington State to Aug. 30 to court television and separate the Bruin season into three parts.

UCLA lost to the Cougars, 37-34, and then to Tennessee, 30-24, after trailing, 24-3, at halftime.

Then came an open date and a chance to lick wounds before going to Texas.

“We were 0-2 in that first season, and we’re 7-0 in the second season and now we have the third season,” Toledo says.

Another open date, and now it’s Washington and USC.

Daily, after practice, he reminded the Bruins of Washington.

On Monday, it was of a year ago when “We were behind, 28-0, and had taken only 13 offensive snaps,” Toledo says.

On Thursday, it was that the Huskies are 13-0 in games after losses in their four seasons under Lambright.

“I reminded them that we had something to do with that,” Toledo says, citing last season’s game, played a week after Washington had lost to Notre Dame, 54-20; of the 1995 game, in which the Huskies beat UCLA, 38-14, a week after they had lost to Oregon, 19-15.

He reminds that Washington is coming off another loss, to Oregon, 31-28.

“They’re mad,” Toledo says. “They’re upset and disappointed, and they want to get back on the field and take it out on someone and we happen to be their next opponent.”

He’s right about that.

Said Huard after the Oregon game, in which he did not play because of an injured ankle, “It was about as frustrating a feeling as I’ve had since my freshman year, when the boo-birds were booing my big brother.”

But all of what Toledo has doled out over the last two weeks, and all he talked about Friday at the team’s hotel and will talk about today before the game is not exactly new information. Players can read, and they have seen the Pac-10 standings, with a four-way tie at the top among UCLA, Washington, Washington State and Arizona State.

They know the Rose Bowl is at stake, and that the Cotton, Sun and Aloha bowls are secondary spoils, save for Arizona State, which can win out and--if it does not make it to the Rose--can play in the Fiesta Bowl.

“We started the season with a loss and we put ourselves behind the eight-ball,” Willmer says. “We knew we had to run the table to go to the Rose Bowl since the first week, and then we started winning a couple of those league games.

“But we’ve been behind the eight-ball the whole time, and we will be there until the SC game, and maybe even after that, depending on what time Washington plays Washington State.

“This game right now is the biggest game this year, so far. This is what we’ve all been working for. Everybody wants to go to the Rose Bowl. That’s why we come here. Now we’ve got a shot at it, and we don’t want to let it go.”

It’s a familiar refrain, heard in Seattle for more than four years, in Westwood for more than a season.

For some, it’s the game of a lifetime.

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* WASHINGTON AT UCLA

* Time: 12:30 p.m. today

* TV: Channel 7