BRUINS KNOW THEY CAN'T LET UP NOW.

Byline: STEVE DILBECK

We interrupt the UCLA mourning period with this exciting revelation: Life goes on.

Not exactly with the same promise, maybe not quite with the same special aura, but it continues and offers hope of a truly memorable season.

Adjust here, arise, get your chinny-chin-chins off the ground and realize what is attainable. This is the wrong time to wallow in what might have been. The perfect season is gone and, almost certainly, a shot at the national championship, too. Deal with it, get over it, move on.

If not, if UCLA is left in some kind of morose stupor, grieving over what got away, it will lose this, its biggest game of the year, this weekend. It will have a singular season of extremes.

The last time UCLA made a run at a national championship and lost a game, it came back in its next game and lost again. The Bruins fell flat, saw a season that aspired to greatness end with consecutive losses.

The Bruins had won 20 consecutive games, were upset and embarrassed in Miami at the end of the season in 1998, and then lost to a Wisconsin team they probably should have beaten in the Rose Bowl.

They looked uninspired, unable to pick themselves up after losing a shot at the national-championship game. Couldn't even get motivated to play in the Rose Bowl.

This time, Stanford ended UCLA's unbeaten season last Saturday and killed a sweet opportunity at playing for the national title.

``It's kind of the same, but it's different,'' said UCLA coach Bob Toledo. ``We had a 20-game winning streak. It was the last game of the season, and even though we ended up going to the Rose Bowl, it was like a big letdown.

``Where this is the middle of the season, there's only three undefeated teams in the country, so that's still going to change. And there's five teams tied in the Pac-10 for the championship. So I look at it as completely different.''

There are five teams in the Pac-10 with one loss, including Saturday opponents UCLA and Washington State. Lose one more and you can kiss the conference title and Fiesta Bowl goodbye.

``The team that loses this game this week, they're out of the Pac-10 race,'' Toledo said.

Lose - and despite all that talent, despite how marvelously the Bruins played in their first six games - and it's a weekend in El Paso waiting as the big payoff, not a BCS bowl game.

And there's no denying the Bruins have to lift themselves, find a way to fire themselves up. Until Stanford, they had excelled at focusing on each game at hand and not allowing themselves to be swept up in a possible national title. But when Stanford won 38-28, they knew exactly what had slipped away and how rare it was to even be in that situation.

``Sure there's a little bit of a letdown and some disappointment,'' Toledo said. ``Because you only get so many opportunities, and that's one of my things, eventually I want to compete for a national championship. We had it in our grasp and we let it go. But we don't know if it's gone for sure.''

See, the carrot is still out there, no matter how distant. In a single weekend when five unbeaten teams can fall, plenty of things appear possible. Remote but at least possible.

Even if convinced the national title will be played out among Miami, Nebraska and Oklahoma, there remains a conference title to be won, a major bowl in which to play. The Bruins are yet in rarefied territory that about 100 programs would love to be in. USC would change places.

Toledo said he sensed the disappointment after the loss at Stanford, but even in the postgame locker room, he quickly tried to refocus the Bruins.

``I just tried to make them realize that not all was lost, like a lot of people are feeling,'' he said. ``There is still a lot to play for.''

Toledo reiterated how much remained at stake when the Bruins met on Monday. He tried to go about the normal routine, handed out individual game awards, pointed out goals to be attained, tried to keep things consistent.

The Bruins can't afford to be flat against a Washington State team that was predicted to finish last in the conference but is 7-1, ranked 16th in the country and playing at home. It's a team the Bruins will need to be inspired against to beat, not shuffling along in some post-loss doldrums. Washington State is the only team to have beaten Stanford.

Toledo is convinced this UCLA team will not suffer the same attitude problems his '98 team did.

``They realize there's still a lot to play for and it's not over yet,'' he said. ``There's a lot of things that can happen in the next three or four weeks.''

Such as playing uninspired and losing at Washington State. This is not the time to regret but to look forward. Their season depends upon it.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Ryan Neece (47) and Eric Stephens celebrate a touchdown during UCLA's loss to Stanford last week. Now UCLA must find a way to regroup, because it is still in contention for the Pacific-10 conference title and a shot at the Fiesta Bowl.

Ben Margot/Associated Press