No Substitute for Enthusiasm, Bruins Learn

UCLA owns L.A. again.

The weekend belongs to the Bruins, the cavorting, slamming, cramming, jamming Bruins who left skid marks on the backs of the Mississippi Rebels on Friday night in an NCAA West Regional first-round game at Mellon Arena.

USC has been exposed and deposed. Pepperdine is a pleasant memory.

Whoosh. Mississippi was left behind, an 80-58 loser, a cipher from almost start to finish, a team chosen by the NCAA to play patsy, to feed into UCLA’s oh-so-certain opinion that it would, as usual, be UCLA once the tournament started.

So it is into the second round of the NCAA tournament for the Bruins, who last we saw were leaving Staples Center with their heads down, their faces long, their words argumentative, their spirits sagging.

“We gotta keep on doing this 40-minute thing,” said freshman Dijon Thompson. It was as if Thompson had discovered the theory of relativity. He spoke in wide-eyed wonderment. Yes, basketball games last 40 minutes and playing hard and well for all of those minutes can offer surprising results.

Rico Hines, a fifth-year senior and leader of UCLA’s five-man second unit on this evening, spoke passionately of having printed the words “Final Four” on his sneakers. “One of my goals six years ago when I decided to come to UCLA was to get to the Final Four,” Hines said. “My roommate from high school, Nate James (Duke), he has a ring. My good friend Cameron Dollar, he has a ring. They both told me, ‘Just be a leader up there. We all have rings and you don’t.’”

So the Bruins have found their legs, their hearts, their love of the game, their free spirits, their enthusiasm. It showed up in practice Thursday when Hines and Billy Knight were diving across the scorer’s table for loose balls. It showed up even earlier, last Sunday, when the Bruins arrived for practice before the NCAA bids were announced, focused and convinced they would get a bid and that they could prove deserving.

There is no denying that UCLA has talent. “This is a Final Four team,” said a media member who watched the Bruins’ second team, the one with the freshmen, step up and shoot with confidence. It would have taken too long to explain about California at the Pac-10 tournament or Arizona State at Pauley or all the other mysterious dead spots the Bruins hit during the bumpy season.

“Wow,” an Ole Miss fan said when Dan Gadzuric nearly pulverized the rim and the backboard on one of his dunk shots. Wow, indeed.

The Bruins had fun. Before the game the players gathered in a circle, arms around each other, laughing and dancing in the tunnel leading to the floor. They were kids, just kids, about to run onto a court and play some ball.

After the opening tip, they scattered as if they were pool balls knocked out of the rack by a cue stick. They tumbled about in no particular direction. They threw the ball away, they threw it in the basket, they outjumped some rebounds, they stole some others, they almost gave away all of a 15-point lead in less than two minutes, but they gained most of it back in two more minutes.

It was breathless basketball played in waves. Coach Steve Lavin was substituting five players at a time. An entire team--Jason Kapono, Knight, Gadzuric, Matt Barnes, Cedric Bozeman--knelt at the scorer’s table once in the first half. They were called back to the bench as the backups--Thompson, Andre Patterson, Ryan Walcott, T.J. Cummings and Hines--kept scoring. And then the backups gave up a couple of open shots and the starters were back on their knees at the scorer’s table. The starters came back, made some stops, made some baskets, made some plays.

In the second half, when the backups were back in, Hines was giggling, Walcott laughing from deep in his belly, Patterson and Gadzuric exchanging high-fives after Cummings jumped about 20 feet to cram down a slam dunk.

This game was a catharsis, a purging of all the bitterness of the last two weeks. This game was a pin taken to the balloon surrounding the memory banks.

Suddenly, in a torrent, the Bruins remembered they could play this game.

Suddenly Knight remembered he could shoot. Thompson recalled he had spring in his legs and a light touch around the basket. Barnes stood at center court talking to Thompson, a senior counseling a freshman, a veteran giving the rookie some tips.

“We just flew towards the ball,” Hines said. “Hopefully we’ll have that total team effort again.”

Knight, who had a game-high 21 points, spoke about what the postseason means. “You hear all this talk about how teams are hot coming into the tournament,” Knight said, “but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s what you do once you get here.”

That’s maybe not the lesson you’d want young men to learn. That just getting by until March is OK. But the Bruins of Lavin keep doing that. Just getting by, then rolling themselves out to turn expectations into triumphs.

Maybe the Bruins will still pay a price for bobbling the regular season. They played themselves down to a No. 8 seeding and now will confront a fierce, proud top-seeded team, Cincinnati.

During the postgame media session, it was announced that the Cincinnati-UCLA game would be all alone on the agenda Sunday, a single game televised to the entire nation. Knight raised his eyebrows and smiled. It was happening just like always. The spotlight is bright and the Bruins can count to 40. Minutes that is.

Drives you crazy, doesn’t it Bruin fans? But here they are, stars again.

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