For Oregon's injured quarterback and his jolted teammates, the healing is mutual.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

If he'd been able to finish his senior season, quarterback Kellen Clemens surely would have left Oregon with a bunch of school records.

Most career touchdown passes. Most passing yards. Most yards of total offense.

Instead, he'll have to settle for this:

Most inspiring example of what it means to be a teammate.

Biggest impact on a football team by a guy on crutches.

Best example of selflessness after seeing your college career end with a broken bone.

Because the image of Kellen Clemens on the sideline on crutches will indeed be one of the enduring images of this Oregon football season. Just as you figured it would, when he got injured at Arizona.

Except it won't symbolize hopelessness for Oregon, but hope; won't symbolize defeat, but triumph against the odds.

Because the Ducks didn't go away after Clemens got hurt; they won the game at Arizona, then won against Cal, in overtime, then won at Washington State with one second remaining. They are 9-1, ranked 10th in the nation.

And Clemens didn't go away, either, though you wouldn't have blamed him, because it hurts deeply to lose your season, lose your place, lose your destiny, or what you thought your destiny was.

Yet there he was, back on the sideline after fracturing his left fibula near the ankle in that Arizona game, newly on crutches and signaling plays, and there he was at the Cal game, less than two weeks after surgery, his leg throbbing so much that one of Oregon's sideline guests, a guy Clemens didn't even know, held the bent leg at a 90-degree angle behind Clemens as he stood on his crutches.

And there he was in Pullman, headset on, cap on backward, eyeblack in place, consulting with sophomore quarterbacks Dennis Dixon and Brady Leaf, signaling plays while balancing on his good leg like a flamingo as Dixon or Leaf held his crutches.

"I don't know how much I'm able to help the team by being around, but I know how much the team is helping me, just by being out there," Clemens said Tuesday. "It's tough. I couldn't lie to you and say that it's easy, being out there at the games, and the game's on the line, and I'm on crutches.

"But it's good for me to be out there. It's good for me to be with the guys, and finish the season with my senior class, the guys I came in with. We've been through so much stuff. All my teammates have done such an amazing job of bringing me through it, of making sure I know they want me out there, and that it's good to have me around.

"It's where I belong. It's my place still."

Saturday, when the Ducks play Oregon State in the Civil War, Clemens will be among the Oregon seniors honored before this last home game of their careers.

"That's going to be tough," he said. "Every first time is tough. First time I sat in the meetings (after surgery) was tough. First time that I went out to practice was tough. First game was definitely tough.

"Coming out of the tunnel my last game at Autzen on crutches is probably going to be pretty emotional."

Understand that Clemens says he's doing "really well." That the swelling in the area of his injury is almost gone, that the pain is completely gone. "Emotionally," he said, "I'm not doing that bad either. It hasn't been the easiest transition, from player to coach, but the wins definitely help.

"I'm really doing pretty dang good."

But, yes, it's been difficult. As soon as he rolled over on the field after being sacked at Arizona, he knew something was broken. He knew he'd never play in the Civil War, but held out hope that he'd return for Oregon's bowl game. That hope was dashed by X-rays the next day in Eugene.

"It just hits you," he said. "I'll never be in (an Oregon) uniform again. Once I got the news that I was done, it just slapped me. I think I was kind of in denial for a little bit. Then slowly there are the little hints and realizations that you're not going to play here again."

That week, he said, he found himself looking at photographs his wife, Nicole, had taken from the stands: Kellen and wide receiver Demetrius Williams, sitting together on the bench. Kellen and Leaf. Kellen, ready to lead the Ducks on the field.

That week, among the 50-some teammates and coaches who visited Clemens in the hospital after his surgery - with 10 to 15 big guys in the room at once, he admitted, it got a little noisy - was cornerback Justin Phinisee.

`He walked in and he says, `It's not the same,' ' Clemens said. "That he was at practice that day and it wasn't the same. Because Justin and I always went at it verbally. I'd try to go at him, and he'd try to pick me, and he said, `I didn't have anybody to yell at today.'

"And then you think, `Wow, I've been going with Demetrius, and against Justin, for five years, and now I'm not going to get to do it again. Just little parts of reality that start to set in."

Clemens has dealt gracefully with that reality, believing that he will emerge a better person.

For that, he thanks Nicole; they were engaged last Christmas, and married last summer, after wondering whether they should wait until after he finished playing at Oregon. As Nicole and her mother left Arizona Stadium, Clemens said, mother told daughter that "somebody knew it was a good thing that you guys get married this summer."

"And that's true," he continued. "I'm doing really good right now, and the main reason for that is because of her."

There's also his religious faith, as a Roman Catholic.

"There's a greater plan out there that doesn't exactly coincide with my own, but that's the one that gets played out," he said. "I could very easily have sat around and said, `Why me, this wasn't supposed to happen to me in my senior year,' but I have a lot of friends who are religious as well, and they said that somewhere down the road you're going to understand that God had a plan for you, and this was the plan that He chose, not that plan that you chose, and that's what makes it the right path."

With his teammates, Clemens has had to adjust to a new path, still a leader, no longer the quarterback. He was vocal with his teammates when the Cal game was on the line, and again at WSU, but is principally the mentor now for Dixon and Leaf, and a go-between with offensive coordinator Gary Crowton, who calls plays from the coaches' booth.

Indeed, the Ducks got NCAA permission to designate Clemens as a graduate assistant coach for the WSU trip, so as not to have to count him as a member of the travel squad.

Clemens said his involvement with the quarterbacks has been a matter of making a couple of observations or suggestions when they come off the field - and come straight to him, by the way. "Other times, it never hurts for a young quarterback to come off the field and have somebody go, `Great job,' ' he said.

As Clemens has tried to help the quarterbacks, having a job, a role, has helped him.

"It's easier when I get so into the game that I forget that it's not me playing and that it was not so very long ago that it was me out there," he said.

He is "so proud" of the young quarterbacks who are out there, especially the way they've supported each other in a two-quarterbacks system, placing the team's goals and dreams ahead of their own goals and dreams.

Maybe they'd have done that anyway.

And maybe they were shown the way by a guy on crutches.