UCLA pulls it together and keeps its date with fate

They will be dragging out the Team of Destiny labels now.

After what UCLA’s Bruins did against Stanford on Thursday night at Pauley Pavilion, anything they might run up against in the upcoming NCAA tournament will be a walk in the park.

The Bruins stole a game from the Cardinal, 77-67. And it wasn’t just any old game, but a game that got them an outright Pacific 10 Conference basketball title and put cement on their grip as the top-seeded team in the West Regional of the NCAA.

You had to see this one to believe it.

The Bruins started poorly and got worse. After their initial 2-0 lead, they weren’t out front again until Luc Richard Mbah a Moute took a nifty pass from Darren Collison with 2:48 left in overtime. They didn’t tie the score until 20 seconds were left in regulation.

They had left their fans sitting on their hands for most of the night. But they sent them home clapping and yelling and flush with pride and amazement.

There was so much at stake, and yet the Bruins started so badly.

There was 1 minute 27 seconds left in the first half, and the team that everybody assumes will be making its third straight trip to the Final Four had scored a mere 14 points.

That’s right, your proud Bruins, on their home court, where opponents are supposed to cower in fear, with the outright Pac-10 title at stake, against an opponent that always stirs extra adrenaline in the boys in blue, had scorched the nets for an average of about 1.3 points a minute.

Pauley Pavilion should have been rocking. Mostly, it was gasping.

Stanford led UCLA at the half, 30-18, and the crowd was getting so desperate for something to make noise about that it took to yelling at the refs on a couple of close plays near the end of the first 20 minutes.

When all else fails, the fans always have that. Yelling at the refs. And, on this crucial night in the second-to-last game of the Pac-10 regular season, all else was failing.

Coach Ben Howland’s team was playing tight, showing little to recommend it to the voters who had made it No. 3 in the country. Stanford was No. 7, with a 13-3 conference record that was one game behind the 14-2 Bruins.

This should have been navigable. UCLA beat the Cardinal at Stanford on Jan. 3, 76-67. Last year, on this same last weekend of the regular season, the Bruins’ goal had been the same and the task much tougher. To win the outright title, they had to do so at Washington State, a good team then and now, nationally ranked then and now.

The Bruins won at Pullman. Now they were stumbling and struggling in their own living room.

And there was so much more here than a conference title, which, in this day and age of March Madness and TV making the NCAA tournament the second coming of Michael Jordan, is all too apparent to players and fans alike.

A UCLA outright conference title, or even a decent showing in next week’s conference tournament at Staples Center, would have made it a certainty that the Bruins would get the top seeding in the West Regional and avoid the rigors of travel and strange time zones, things that knock good teams out.

In a media gathering Tuesday, Kevin Love, UCLA’s star freshman center, gave the mandatory answer to the question of this game’s import.

“We want to win the conference,” he said.

Then he added what probably is first and foremost in the minds of young players who have been brought up on the NCAA razzle-dazzle. Hook up any college basketball player to a polygraph machine and ask whether, he would take a Final Four berth or a conference title. Easy answer. They’d take the bright lights and Billy Packer.

“Our long-range goal is to get the top seed in the West,” Love said.

About the only thing that could get in the way of the Bruins and top stature in the West was, well, Stanford. A win in Pauley, a conference title or piece of it, and a better showing than UCLA in the conference tourney -- as well as circumstances for the NCAA tournament committee that prompted them to give somebody else in the West the No. 2 seeding -- and Howland’s worst fears could be realized. Unlikely, yet possible.

“Big difference, traveling to Detroit,” Howland said, “when you can be in Phoenix.”

The NCAA West is in Phoenix, after a subregional at the Honda Center in Anaheim, a certain site for UCLA.

So, with all this on the line, on a night when they were herky-jerky when smooth and silky was expected and needed, the Bruins somehow rose from the dead.

Russell Westbrook sneaked in for a huge rebound on a missed free throw. Love played like a 30-year-old veteran. Collison, quiet for so much of the night, finally took over.

It was such a dramatic reversal, so devastating that you almost felt sorry for Stanford. Mostly, you felt amazement that, for the third season in a row, Los Angeles appears to have a Team of Destiny, heading for the Final Four.

Yup. There’s that label. It’s irresistible.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.