Scream and roll may be best play now

Sprinting from the smoldering wreckage, racing to the sunny regionals, Russell Westbrook soared through the Anaheim night and slammed down the punctuation dunk and finished with the perfect description.

He screamed.

He screamed, and maybe you didn’t hear him because you were screaming too.

“No words, just screaming,” Westbrook said. “Screaming because we won. Screaming because it was over.”

If UCLA wins the national championship, you will remember that scream, because the Bruins will have won that championship in its echo.

They will have won it Saturday in a 53-49 second-round victory over Texas A&M; that should have been a loss.

They will have won it after being pummeled and pushed and beaten in broad brush strokes in the paint.

They will have won it with six of their eight players tied behind their backs.

They will have won it after trailing for all but a minute and a half of the second win.

That win came in the final moments with a layup, a blocked shot, a final dunk, and then chaos.

The 17,600 folks at the Honda Center roared like perhaps no UCLA crowd has ever roared.

I’m writing these words 90 minutes after the final buzzer, and my ears are still ringing.

The exhausted, ecstatic Bruins celebrated like few UCLA teams celebrate, dancing and hugging and filling the hockey arena with an incredible heat.

I’m writing these words in a chilly tunnel next to the court, but my shirt is soaking wet.

Finally, the beaten Aggies team despaired like few teams despair, some of them collapsing in tears, a couple of them nearly coming to blows during their final angst-filled midcourt huddle.

In their locker room later, they shuffled through piles of dirty clothes and trash as if walking through the scene of a robbery.

“UCLA won it, but we should have won it,” whispered Aggies guard Donald Sloan. “And seven out of 10 times, we do win it.”

Yeah, but Westbrook screamed and Sloan whispered because the Bruins did win it, just like they’ve always won these game in the Ben Howland era.

“We don’t crack,” said Darren Collison. “We play until there’s zero-zero-zero up there on the board.”

This is not the most amazing tournament win in the Howland era -- that title still belongs to the 2006 regional semifinal comeback victory against Gonzaga.

But this is his signature win, because this is exactly what he teaches.

Don’t crack.

Summon the depths of your spirit and, if that fails, then summon the depths of the traditional Bruins spirit.

And so it happened in the final seven minutes Saturday, with Kevin Love becoming Bill Walton, and Collison becoming Tyus Edney.

And Josh Shipp was, well, for a brief moment, actually Josh Shipp.

In those final minutes, Love had four blocked shots and six points, leading to a 47-all tie with a minute remaining.

“I was having fun, this is just basketball, it’s not like our lives are on the line,” the freshman Love said afterward with a grin.

He paused.

“Well, in a way, our lives are kind of on the line,” he said.

After Love set up the win, Collison completed it with two driving, high-banking layups over several pairs of desperately straining Aggies arms.

“Coach put the ball in my hands,” Collison said. “I wanted to take advantage of it.”

Finally, then, Shipp saved the win by blocking Sloan’s layup with four seconds remaining, leading to Westbrook’s icy icing dunk.

This same slumping Shipp scored zero points, had but three rebounds, was basically invisible until that final moment.

“Around here we learn to pick up our intensity,” Shipp said. “That’s just what I did.”

According to Sloan, Shipp picked it up too much.

“He fouled me,” Sloan said. “I’m sure he fouled me.”

Perhaps he did, but it was in the middle of such a scrum that there was no way any official would make that call.

Just as, in the middle of the roaring Honda Center crowd, down the stretch, there was no way the Aggies could gain any momentum.

“The crowd was a big factor, and that’s good, that’s the way it should be,” Collison said. “We were the No. 1 seed. We should be playing here. We earned it.”

They earned it with Love and Collison combining for 40 of their 53 points. They earned it despite being outscored by 10 points inside, and by seven points off the bench, and by three points on second chances.

“This is crazy,” said senior Lorenzo Mata-Real. “I’ve seen three years of this stuff, and I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

Did the Bruins get lucky? Absolutely.

Does this also mean the Bruins are really good? Absolutely.

“You have to win games like this to get to the Final Four,” said Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who committed six turnovers and was out of sorts in his first game since spraining his ankle last week. “These are the kind of games that make you believe.”

The last two years, the Bruins have survived these kind of tough second-round games against Alabama and Indiana.

“The one thing I love about our team is that they know in their heart they’re always going to win the game,” said Howland. “They’re going to find a way.”

They will need to find a better way against prospective tournament opponents like Texas, Memphis, Kansas and North Carolina.

Playing this kind of game won’t win those games. Playing this kind of game might be good enough to survive the weak West Regional this week in Phoenix, but won’t get them much farther.

The Bruins aren’t listening to any of that right now, though.

They are too busy screaming. And they are not alone.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.