SECOND HALF BELONGS TO BOOTY.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Twice, he hit receivers in the hands on the dead run only to see the ball end up on the grass, plays that could have made things comfortable for USC long before the fog rolled in and Cal rolled over. Once, he hit a receiver right in the rear end with a short pass, what the football coaches term miscommunication. A couple of other throws went so far out of bounds they're still bobbing up and down in Gatorade.

That was how John David Booty's early evening went, before it turned into John David Booty's kind of night.

``Basically, big plays were going off fingertips for us,'' Booty said later.

In the up-and-down rookie season of this USC quarterback, there has not been a single game that summed it up quite as sweetly as the Trojans' 23-9 victory over Cal on Saturday under the Coliseum lights, a result that gave them the Pac-10 championship and the right to dream bigger.

The first half was a mess of bad throws and bad luck and the Trojans were in trouble.

The second was a Matt Leinart impersonation and the Trojans were in the national-title picture.

Booty ended up with 18completions from 31 throws for 238 yards and two touchdowns.

In the mind's eye, blurred a bit by the mist that began to pour over the Coliseum rim in the third quarter, the 21-year-old junior's night is summed up by four plays.

First half: A third-down deep throw to Dwayne Jarrett clicks off the split end's fingernails, and a third-down lob to Steve Smith sneaks over the flanker's hands at the left end zone flag.

Second half: A dart of a pass from the Cal 25 hits Jarrett in the chest in the end zone a nanosecond before two Golden Bears crunched the receiver, and a feather to Smith makes it touchdowns on back-to-back drives and shows us what it sounds like when 91,672 people exhale at once.

The first touchdown gave the Trojans the lead at 16-9 early in the fourth quarter. The second put the game away on the night when the conference's highest-rated defense was too much for what was supposed to be a big-play Cal offense.

The first?

``He threw the touchdown pass of the year,'' Trojans coach Pete Carroll said afterward.

The second?

Think of it as the easy touchdown Booty had coming to him deep in a season when he has weathered the loud whispers that he's no Leinart to get the job done over and over, in a game where he could have got discouraged and didn't.

It was fourth-and-2 at the Cal 37 when Booty went under center. The Trojans were up by a touchdown with 8 1/2 minutes on the clock.

A moment later, Booty was looking over the linemen and seeing Smith, the Taft High of Woodland Hills graduate, running open from here to Galen Center, the sort of vision that must make a quarterback's heart jump into his throat.

``He came down (the line) and bluffed a block,'' Booty said of Smith, who'd been in motion to the right. ``He kind of got lost in there.''

Lost to the Golden Bears. Suddenly Smith was loose behind star cornerback Daymeion Hughes and there was no safety in the frame.

``(Smith) was the third option on the play, so it took me a while to find him,'' Booty said. ``I thought, `God, don't let me overthrow him.' I was able to lay it in there.''

The fourth-quarter passes to Jarrett and Smith continued a streak for Booty, who has thrown a touchdown pass in all 10 games for the third-ranked Trojans, now 9-1 overall and 7-1 in the Pac-10.

Until now, Booty's ``best'' game statistically had been his 406-yard, three-touchdown effort against Oregon State. But the Trojans lost that game last month. There are no good losses for a quarterback.

This was one to savor.

``I feel awesome,'' Booty said amid the back-slappers on the field after the clock ran out. ``We just really had to make plays, and we did.''

The Trojans won for all sorts of reasons Saturday night. Their defense made more big plays than Cal's offense. They saw freshman tailback C.J. Gable (Sylmar High) run for 112 yards with Chauncey Washington going easy on a sore knee. In the Who's That? moment of the year, they got a 49-yard field goal on the first USC attempt by David Beuhler, a JC transfer listed as a fullback, placekicker and safety. They might have got lucky when a no-catch call on Jarrett wiped out a fumble that was run back for an apparent touchdown.

Mainly, though, they won because John David Booty, whose numbers will never match Matt Leinart's, came up just as huge when it mattered most.

Early, he hit a receiver in the butt.

Late, he heard fans chanting ``Booty.''

A perfect ending.

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USC quarterback John David Booty finished with two touchdowns and helped the Trojans win the Pac-10 title.

Michael Owen Baker/L.A. Daily News