Love-Hate Relationship With Bruins

The toughest job in sports is being a UCLA basketball fan.

Have you taken to your bed with the covers over your head? Do you break into a cold sweat when the opening horns trill out the first chords of the fight song? Is your head about to bust open?

Are you, UCLA basketball fan, happy that the Bruins upset Stanford, 95-92, at Maples Pavilion on Saturday? Are you happy that the Bruins scored 49 points in the first half against Stanford or totally befuddled as to how the Bruins could score only 18 points Thursday at California?

Happy that the Bruins dominated Stanford with Matt Barnes watching from the stands or furious that the full-strength Bruins were dominated by Cal?

Happy that the Bruins led the Cardinal by 20 with 5:20 left or confused at how the Bruins led the Cardinal by only three at the end of the game?

Happy that your coach, Steve Lavin, saved himself again or secretly disappointed that your coach didn’t come home a beaten man, a man who had finally lost his grip on this most holy job?

Are you tired of this back-and-forth, good-and-bad, infuriating-exhilarating basketball team? Or is this twice-a-week adrenaline rush what you live for?

Is it fun to guess whether Cedric Bozeman is going to play like an All-American or a high school rookie? Is it exciting to wager with your friends whether Jason Kapono will get 12 shots or three, whether Dan Gadzuric will be active and dominating or stagnant and invisible?

Do you have any hair left, UCLA rooters? Or have you pulled it all out because a team with so much talent, a team with Andre Patterson and Dijon Thompson, freshmen who can come into a game against the No. 10 team in the country, under circumstances of extreme desperation and great tension, and see them play as if they didn’t have a care in the world and see them nonchalantly make layups and three-pointers and jump shots and grab huge rebounds and play intense defense, and yet you have a team which can play so badly so often?

Your coach says, “I’m proud of our kids and the bounce-back and resilience they showed. That’s been the mark of our program, at least during our tenure. Hopefully it can continue like this. We lost three of four playing poorly, but today we played well, other than the late-game turnovers and some missed free throws and some poor time and score and clock management.”

And don’t you just want to run screaming from the building? Or not? It’s good that the Bruins can bounce back. But is it good to have the need to be resilient as the mark of the program?

Analyze the rest of that sentence. Good or bad? Happy or sad? Thrill to the good performances or bust a blood vessel from all those late-game turnovers and missed free throws?

Or how about this? Your coach says: “We dribbled less today and our four-out, one-in-motion offense is starting to come together. We’ve worked on it all year, but we hadn’t used it in games until a little bit in the second half against SC and in the second half of ‘Nova and for most of the Arizona game. But we didn’t use it much against Arizona State and Cal.”

Dribbling less is good. But don’t you want to ask someone, anyone, about this “four-out, one-in-motion offense,” and how, if it’s been practiced all year and it worked so well against Arizona and Stanford, then why wasn’t it used against Arizona State or Cal or in the second half of the USC and Villanova games? Don’t you want to grab Lavin and beg him to tell you, the loyal UCLA fan, what has taken so long? Why is it Game 27 and the offensive experimenting is still going on?

Well, take heart, UCLA fans. You’re just ahead of the college basketball curve. Lavin and the Bruins got you there first. Take a look around.

The more teams play, the less you know.

Not only do you not know what’s going to happen next with your team, you have no clue about what you’ve just seen.

To paraphrase college basketball’s top TV analyst Billy Packer, who was courtside here Saturday, “Who knew? Wow. How’d that happen?”

Packer meant, of course, who knew UCLA could score so much, play so well; and wow, we almost forgot how fast UCLA can give up a 20-point lead so quickly and easily. But you can take Packer’s amazement to another level.

How do you figure out the Pac-10?

As of today, the only Pac-10 teams with momentum are Cal, with big wins over USC and UCLA; and Stanford, No. 10 in the country not much longer, with two home losses and a baffled coach asking, “What’s wrong? I don’t know.”

Except for Kansas, Duke and Maryland, the NCAA tournament motto might be: “The more they play, the murkier it gets.”

Trends? You’ve got to be kidding.

Momentum? Yeah, right.

On Saturday Lavin called the Bruins “a work in progress.” He said that with a straight face, as if he believed it. Do you believe that, UCLA fans? You might as well.

You might as well start chanting “Four in, one out,” and “bounce back, bounce back.” Those were the Lavin talking points Saturday. He repeated each phrase at least four times during his postgame chattering.

Whatever that means, you, the UCLA fan, and all the rest of us, might as well believe it means, “Who the heck knows what’s happening next. But it’ll be fun watching. Won’t it?”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.