PITINO FORGOTTEN IN PAULEY FRENZY.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Nothing like a USC game to make a UCLA coach forget his troubles. Or find out how much worse they can get.

Steve Lavin endured more heartburn along the way Thursday, such as the time when he ordered his Bruins to play for the last shot of the first half and Ray Young, well-tutored upperclassman that he is, clanked a jumper off the rim with 20 seconds on the clock.

And such as the Trojans' rally that hammered away almost all of a 19- point Bruins lead.

After the Young mistake, Lavin barked a one-word reaction that might have offended the lip-readers in the stands, and slammed his clipboard to the floor. Then he went toe to toe with the guard and chewed him out, looking like a coach sending an I'm-in-charge-here message to everyone watching.

But this turned out to be just the kind of night Lavin needed to put Rick Pitino on the back pages, an 80-75 victory in a ragged game in front of a fired-up sellout crowd of 12,109 at Pauley Pavilion that gave UCLA a 3-0 start to the Pacific-10 schedule.

``Our kids did a great job of focusing this week despite all the distractions,'' Lavin said.

It's not the first time a Lavin team is on a high when he seems to be at a low.

Knock him down, step on his face, slander his name all over the place. Then watch out, especially if you're USC.

Last season the Trojans went to Pauley when the Bruins were on a three- game losing streak. The Bruins came from 10 points down to win.

That's the way it has gone for Lavin against USC. His teams have won eight of nine meetings with the crosstown rival. Four of those wins followed UCLA losses and two snapped losing streaks.

This was different and the same all at once.

The Bruins came in on a three-game winning streak. Little did that matter to Lavin's gastric juices, which have been bubbling away ever since he heard from reporters on Tuesday that athletic director Peter Dalis has been chatting with Pitino, the Boston Celtics coach until he resigned Monday.

This might have been the first time in 39 years USC played UCLA when the former was ranked and the latter wasn't. The story, though, was all UCLA. All Lavin.

How would the crowd be behind him? How big would the crowd be?

Then it started, a high-spirited game that produced three technical fouls in the first minute-and-a-half and bodies flying throughout.

Of course the Pauley crowd was behind him. He's UCLA's coach, at least for now, and that was USC across the way.

The crowd was the story, too. Dalis, in his uncharacteristic soul-bearing to the press on Tuesday, had said he was pleased with the team's performance ``the last few games'' but volunteered his disappointment with the attendance. This was UCLA's second sellout and its biggest crowd of the season by more than 1,500.

Lavin made his first appearance five minutes before tipoff, walking out from the quaintly canopied doorway from the locker room and shaking hands with the uniformed officer who would escort him to the court.

The crowd was cheering the UCLA players, who already were on the court, but a few shouts of encouragement for Lavin could be heard.

He passed the back-slappers, and the guy wearing the motorcycle goggles and the carved-out Bruins-blue basketball on his head, spotted a friend in a baseline seat a veered off to hug her. She was Bobbi Fisher, who runs a literacy program Lavin supports at Chapman University. Fisher said she wrote a letter to UCLA's chancellor this week, sticking up for Lavin.

``Sometimes, in the frenzy of life, we forget there are more important things than winning,'' Fisher told a reporter.

Sometimes, just not in the frenzy of UCLA-USC, which is why Lavin needed this one.