CURSED BY CADE IN '98 RIVALRY GAME?

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

If you believe a football field is a moral universe, if you believe the One Great Scorer cares how you played the game, if you believe no lapse of sportsmanship goes unpunished, you'll want to believe in the parable of Cade McNown and his 23-yard run to darkness.

Maybe it's sheer coincidence.

Or, maybe it explains all of the bad things that have happened to UCLA since that moment.

The fable begins in the final 30 seconds of the 1998 UCLA-USC game. UCLA was leading 34-17 and had the ball, third down and 9 yards to go, as if down and distance mattered by then. McNown, the Bruins' All-American quarterback, had only to take the snap and touch a knee to the Rose Bowl grass to run out the clock on the team's eighth consecutive victory over the Trojans and 20th consecutive win overall. Instead, McNown kept his feet, faked a pitchout to a running back, then spun and ran around right end for a 23-yard gain before stepping out of bounds in front of his own bench.

``I'm not sure what that last play of the game was about,'' Paul Hackett, then the Trojans' head coach, would complain a few minutes later.

Hackett told reporters McNown's run was uncalled for.

McNown has pleaded not guilty to the charge that, with the game decided, he was pouring it on.

``Somebody tried to take the attention off the score,'' McNown told a Daily News reporter this week, suggesting Hackett's angry postgame statement was a diversionary tactic.

``We did that all the time, we wouldn't take knees,'' said McNown, currently on the San Francisco 49ers' injured list after arm surgery. ``If everybody (on defense) is crashing the middle, I'd keep it. It's not like throwing the ball into the end zone or something like that. We were just trying to keep the clock moving.''

Hackett is gone, but remaining Trojans haven't forgotten the insult.

``They were just kind of rubbing it in our face,'' said Carson Palmer, the USC quarterback, who as a freshman made his third collegiate start in that 1998 game, completing 28 of 43 passes for 252 yards but throwing two interceptions, which were among seven Trojans turnovers. ``It kind of (made us mad).

``The game was over. They had won. I couldn't have felt any worse about it if he had scored or if he had knelt down.''

The Bruins were on top of the city and at the peak of their 90-year football history that afternoon, having extended their dominance of their crosstown rivals and put themselves within one victory of a berth in the Fiesta Bowl national-championship game.

But, it seemed, pride turned to hubris when McNown took off for that gratuitous gallop. And it just might be that the Bruins have been paying for their mistake ever since. Their demons had been unleashed.

The 20-win streak ended with the defensive collapses against Miami, costing the Bruins their national-title shot, and Wisconsin, in the Rose Bowl game. The eight-win streak turned into three consecutive losses to the Trojans.

If, as the odds predict, UCLA loses to USC on Saturday and to Washington State on Dec. 7, the Bruins will be a .500 team (24-24) since McNown's run in 1998.

As the Bruins and head coach Bob Toledo have lurched from the handicapped-parking scandal to the DeShaun Foster SUV scandal to the Cory Paus drunken-driving scandal - to too many season-changing injuries to count - the search for an explanation has gone cosmic.

Maybe the team plane strayed into the Bermuda Triangle on the way to that game in Miami. Maybe Toledo broke a mirror while checking the results of his diet. Or, maybe there's some sort of karma at work here.

If the Boston Red Sox have the Curse of the Bambino, the Bruins can have the Curse of Cade.

It's Twilight Zone stuff, admittedly, but if you think there's a right and a wrong way to play the game, you want to believe it's true.

For this year's Bruins and the Trojans, the moral of the story is clear:

If it's late in the afternoon Saturday at the Rose Bowl, and you're winning the game by more than a touchdown, and you've got the ball with the seconds ticking away, don't get carried away.

Stand up for sportsmanship by kneeling down.