Rest Assured, Losing Not So Bad

Euphoria is OK.

For the moment.

Dreaming is fine.

For now.

Maybe UCLA and USC will play each other for a third time this season. On Saturday. Winner goes to the NCAA tournament. Loser goes home.

It could happen.

After UCLA had gone to overtime to upset Arizona, the No. 1-ranked team in the country, 96-89 Thursday afternoon, USC came out Thursday night and upset Stanford, the No. 15-ranked team, 79-74.

Our town’s lovable losers have made it to the semifinals of the Pac-10 tournament. Both UCLA (10-18) and USC (12-16) must win the tournament to go to the NCAAs.

So be excited. But just a little.

You’d think it would be easier now that the league’s Nos. 1 and 2 teams have been sent home.

It won’t be.

The class of the league didn’t need to win Thursday.

The teams that are left do. For better NCAA seeding. For proof they are capable of great accomplishments. For a far-fetched chance to get into the big event.

Arizona and Stanford might not be all that disappointed to be going home. Everybody else will be.

Arizona Coach Lute Olson said, “I’m obviously disappointed with the loss.”

What Olson meant was, “I’m disappointed we had to fly in here for even one day and act as if we took this tournament seriously.”

And Olson said, “People forget about 1997, our last two games prior to going to the NCAA, we lost at Cal and Stanford and we came out to win the national championship.”

What Olson meant was, “You think I care about losing to UCLA on a Thursday afternoon when I can take my team home now, heal up a bunch of injuries?”

Olson also said, “We never come into something that we don’t want to win. The biggest thing now is taking a look at what did we do that we need to do better.”

What Olson meant was, “I’ve got a whole lot of things to yell about in practice now and the kids will have to listen. They lost.”

It was a glorious moment for UCLA basketball, no doubt about it. Senior Jason Kapono was all over the place, not missing free throws, shooting light and airy three-pointers. Fifth-year senior Ray Young made the basket of a lifetime, a game-tying three-pointer to force overtime and cause Olson to say that the difference between UCLA now and the two previous times Arizona had crushed the Bruins this season was Young’s move to point guard.

“Ray Young at point guard creates a lot of problems because he’s a scorer and he opens up the passing lanes,” Olson said as explanation for why Arizona had crushed the Bruins twice this year.

What Olson meant was, “Who thought it was a good idea to play Cedric Bozeman and Ryan Walcott at point guard all season?”

And it was a fabulous, frenetic, wildly entertaining, scrambling, stumbling, stampeding evening for the Trojans. They built a 14-point lead, lost all but two points of it, but didn’t lose all of it, not for a moment.

“I don’t think Arizona came over here just for the hell of it,” USC Coach Henry Bibby said. “It would have been nice if Stanford said, ‘Here’s the game,’ but they didn’t say that. You saw them play the game down to the wire.”

But as Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery noticed, his team wasn’t “mentally engaged” for 40 minutes. Stanford had beaten USC twice this year. The games hadn’t been easy. USC could have won both. The Cardinal wasn’t so much better than the Trojans. Except in the Pac-10 standings.

Olson dismisses conference tournaments vocally. He complains there’s no point to playing the same teams three times in a season, that nothing is proved.

So Olson didn’t bring Arizona to Los Angeles until Wednesday evening. The Wildcats skipped their Staples Center practice and the media day sessions. Montgomery did the same with Stanford last year and the Cardinal was slaughtered by USC. Stanford came to Staples on Wednesday. At least

the Cardinal didn’t get slaughtered this

time.

Is anyone really surprised the Wildcats lost this game, even to wandering UCLA, the team with the lame-duck coach, the team that needed to sneak into the tournament by surging back from a 14-point deficit to beat awful Washington just last Saturday?

The Wildcats are just about guaranteed to be seeded No. 1 in an NCAA regional, probably the West, based on a spectacular regular season.

Several Arizona players are hurting. All-American Luke Walton has a bad ankle and a sore groin. Point guard Salim Stoudamire is achy and grouchy because of tendinitis.

And it’s not shocking that Stanford wasn’t at its physical, fighting best. Stanford is going to the NCAA tournament for sure. The Cardinal probably will get a No. 3 or No. 4 seeding somewhere. What happened here probably wasn’t going to change that.

What was the attraction of three games in three days? What was the upside to Arizona’s scrambling and playing hard and throwing themselves into the frenzy of conference tournament action when they could go one-and-out, fly home Thursday evening, barely 24 hours after flying in?

Stanford is not a team so talented that it ever wins easily. “Our team has to grind out our victories,” Montgomery said. It’s tiring, all that grinding, scratching, clawing. It takes great willpower. A Pac-10 tournament title, while nice, may not be so nice that it’s worth gathering all that willpower for three straight nights. Or even one.

So Arizona and Stanford have left the building. That doesn’t mean things are easier for UCLA and USC. It means things are harder.

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