Bookmark this season forever.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

WE'VE REACHED the end of the book. There are no more pages to turn. No more drama to thrill us, to make our hearts race, to entertain and inspire and, now and then, to bring tears to our eyes.

We've been engrossed in the story of the Oregon football season, with all the compelling characters. Joey. Rashad. Justin. Keenan.

And now we don't want to close the book. Don't want the story to be over, even if the season was so long, an epic.

We think, as an avid reader - Oregon coach Mike Bellotti did earlier this season, then reflecting on the great seniors he would lose - of a snippet of lyrics from "Dangling Conversation," the old Simon & Garfunkel song:

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we've lost. ...

So we sit with the book in our laps, and we remember the chapters:

Eleven wins. The comeback against Wisconsin. The celebration when Jared Siegel's field goal connected against Southern Cal. The way Onterrio Smith ran through Washington State, and the way linebacker Wesley Mallard saved that game, and the UCLA game the following week.

We remember Keenan Howry returning that punt through the rainstorm against Oregon State. We remember Joey Harrington taking that last, long look around Autzen Stadium. We remember the Pac-10 championship.

And we remember watching 38 straight points against Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl and hearing the Oregon fans afterward, chanting "We're No. 1," loudly, proudly and, first the first time in school history, with every reason to believe it.

The final ranking was an unprecedented No. 2 in both polls. The team that produced Oregon's best season ever was surpassed only by a team that some thought was Miami's best national championship team ever, and behind Oregon in the polls were Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

If a great book is one that, in some way, changes the reader, then perhaps this season has somehow changed Oregon football.

"I think it's a state of mind," mused Rick Burton, nationally prominent director of the university's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. "We've always been comfortable with being the underdog. We've always been comfortable with being part of the country that people back East don't think has electricity or running water. To have finished seventh last year and to (have been) potentially national champions this year is starting to put us in the regular company of the schools that we think of as being the football powerhouses. ...

"In some people's minds, Oregon is not yet one of those regular powerhouses. The truth is that we really are."

Certainly, the Ducks were a powerhouse against Colorado, on their biggest national stage ever, and for all their disappointment in how the Bowl Championship Series system treated them, they also must recognize this: They got far more credit and gained far more stature by routing the Buffaloes than they ever could have had if the Rose Bowl had produced the traditional matchup with the Big Ten champion, Illinois.

At the heart of the Oregon season on the field was Harrington, the remarkable quarterback, but perhaps not enough has been said about the impact of Bellotti, the remarkable coach.

Harrington and his classmates elevated this team; Bellotti, with support from his school and its donors, has elevated this program into national title contenders. For all of Oregon's new facilities, he remains the football program's most important asset, a coach who leads, who motivates; a coach whose creativity has given Oregon a distinctive, cutting-edge style.

This season, Bellotti took all the disparate elements - the pressures on Harrington, the expectations of the Ducks, the questions about the Oregon defense, the disappointment after the loss to Stanford, the practices before the Dec. 1 Civil War and then before the bowl game - and made it all work.

He led the Ducks to the Fiesta Bowl, and he willed them there. He did so in the months after he lost his father to cancer, and an aunt to cancer, and while one of his closest friends was fighting cancer. In a show of support for his friend, he shaved his trademark mustache. It made him look older and, by the end of the long season, he undoubtedly felt older.

"I'd like to be known as the best," Bellotti said, of his goals for his program. "I think we all want to leave our legacy, whatever it may be. The winning and the losing sometimes is way overblown. I'd like to think that I've made a difference in the lives of young men. That've I've done things with integrity that people respect. And I also think that doing it at Oregon maybe carries more weight than doing it some other places, and I think there's value to that, and a lesson to be learned."

A season ago, he turned down Ohio State, Southern Cal and Arizona State. Last month, he said no to Notre Dame. Never say never, but I think he'll be at Oregon through the rest of this decade.

When Bellotti reflected the other day on what images from this season stood out to him, he didn't talk of wins. He spoke of a personal pleasure, the success of his son, Luke, and daughter, Keri, as athletes at Sheldon High School. He spoke of the images that were part of this special team: long-haired defensive tackle Chris Tetterton wearing his '70s leisure suit at the airport in Los Angeles; Harrington's performances on and off the field; the friendship of running backs Maurice Morris and Onterrio Smith, "one of the greatest things I've seen in sports."

All that makes it difficult to close the book on this season. But this one will always have a special place in the Oregon sports library, and soon enough we'll be ready to peruse the next volume.