Cougars Get The Last Laugh

Like finding caviar in the soap dish.

All pertinent analogies to Washington State’s mystical and sudden resurrection will be gladly accepted - not that these things necessarily have to be explained.

Only appreciated and admired.

The Cougars supplied the first stain to Oregon’s 1997 record Thursday night, outhustling and mostly outhearting the Ducks 81-76 at the Spokane Arena on a particularly peculiar evening of Pacific-10 Conference basketball.

Driven home most emphatically in the process was not any obvious superiority or genius, but this: that what looks like a broken bottle might well be a diamond ring.

And vice versa.

Armed with this knowledge, Cougar coach Kevin Eastman refrained from any postgame neener-neeners.

The calamity of Wazzu’s Southern California swing is still an unsightly souvenir, not to be stowed in the subconscious until March, probably. You don’t forgot back-toback losses by a total of 61 points, possibly because a pair of them rather than a single suggests that it’s no fluke.

As for wins like this, well, you take it on faith.

“Look, we may have another Southern California deal,” Eastman admitted. “One game doesn’t turn what happened down there around.

“But if it happens, I want it to happen with people saying at the end the game, ‘They outplayed them - they just lost.’ If we can get tremendous energy from our team every game, I’ll be able to live whether we win or lose.”

But this one they won - the game, and some converts.

Just when Cougar basketball’s romance with Spokane appeared to be on the rocks (see the San Jose game, attendance 1,887), more than 5,000 came out of the woodwork this night - not the 11,000 who packed the joint for UCLA, but plenty considering the glut of college basketball in neighboring gyms and Wazzu’s recent work. Now, perhaps they came looking for a car wreck, but that didn’t keep them from raising a ruckus at the checkered flag.

“It felt like home,” said Cougars forward Carlos Daniel, “because we weren’t in parts unknown.”

The patrons were most appreciative after the Ducks dragged themselves back from a 14-point deficit to take a 66-65 lead, with just less than 5 minutes left.

It was here on the holiday trip to Hawaii that the Cougs were cued for the big play and flubbed their lines. Here, however, Isaac Fontaine came up with a dagger of a 3-pointer and Rodrigo de la Fuente turned a steal into a dunk - and it was Oregon, 10-0 and ranked 17th in the country, that opted for panic. Speaking of which, if the Ducks are No. 17 in our land, gravy is a cologne. The average RPI college basketball’s Nielsen’s - of Oregon’s victims is about 130 on a scale of 1 to 300, so the Ducks haven’t been beating up many bullies. But 10-and-oh is 10-and-oh, and surely they have some athletes the Cougars must envy.

What they didn’t have this night was much siccum.

“We’ve had three halves this year when we’ve expected people to ask for our autograph instead of play,” said Oregon coach Jerry Green. “They just had a lot more fight in the first half than we did.”

Collectively, it showed up in the numbers. The Cougars forged an impossible 35-18 advantage on the boards - it grew to 20 by game’s end - and held the normally dead-eye Ducks (51 percent on the year) to just 38.2 percent.

Individually, it showed up most in the eyes and faces.

There were the three steely 3-pointers by freshman Blake Pengelly, a Eugene native the Ducks suggested walk on. Some savage blocks by Daniel. The increasingly routine high-wire antics of Beau Archibald. And an improbable double-double from Cameron Johnson, who may yet make the all-afterthought team.

“Coach calls me the quintessential role player - if he knows what that means,” Johnson said. “One of my roles is to rebound.”

Does he know what it means?

“Quintessential? I haven’t looked it up.”

We’ll use it in a sentence: Thursday was quintessential college basketball nonsense.

At Stanford, the UCLA team which beat Wazzu by 28 a week ago lost by 48 to the Cardinal - while in Spokane, the Cougs rearranged the Top 25.

“I’m not sure why,” Eastman shrugged. “Who knows why there are such wild ups and downs? I think people are defending harder - I thought both teams stunk offensively tonight because they got after it defensively.

“UCLA has proven in 12 games they can be up or down - and their up is unbelievable. They crushed us and it wasn’t a game. I think we’ve found more of a middle ground.”

For one night, anyway.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review