Connor Doyle

When the season started in November, which seems like ages ago for this Arizona men's basketball team, UA head coach Lute Olson said this team had no business being in Madison Square Garden for the IKON Coaches vs. Cancer Classic. To a certain extent, he was right.

After all, the Wildcats were the only team of the four in the tournament not ranked in the Top 25. Plus, the team was starting two freshmen, a junior who had made an unsuccessful attempt to jump to the NBA after his sophomore season, another junior who was known more for his father than his game and another junior who had redshirted the year before. Plus, the first two off the bench were freshmen too. This is not the team from which hope springs.

Then the Wildcats knocked off No. 3 Maryland and No. 5 Florida in consecutive days and went on to beat two more Top 25 teams in their next three games. Suddenly, they're not only on everyone's Top 25 list, but they're pretty high too. Few paid attention as Olson insisted that this team wasn't ready for the bright lights. Yet.

And he was right.

The team went on to lose to a bad Michigan State team and to a then-unknown Oregon team (twice). The fall out of grace was precipitous. But then something funny happened. Actually, two funny things happened.

USC, at the time the Pacific 10 Conference leader, came into McKale undefeated in conference play and left with an embarrassing loss. Two nights later, UCLA found itself on the short end of a scoreboard after a 20-point halftime lead.

It could be said that this was the turning point in the season. Arizona had welcomed the best the Pac-10 had to offer and beaten them in stylish fashion. But there's still work that needs to be done, and the coaching staff knows it.

For every astonishing victory against Stanford in Maples, there's a confounding loss to Connecticut at home. For every comeback victory, there's that comeback that never materialized against ASU. And that's what makes this such a compelling team, perhaps the most since the squad that beat three No. 1 seeds in the 1997 NCAA Tournament en route to the school's only National Championship.

And part of what makes this such an interesting team is the growth witnessed over the course of a season. Luke Walton, offspring of the legendarily verbose Bill Walton, has now not only established himself as a primary scoring threat and the leader of this team (a title thought to belong solely to Jason Gardner at one point), but one of the best the Pac-10 has to offer. The freshman that everyone comes out to see isn't Will Bynum, he of Fox Sports Net Preps fame, but Salim Stoudamire, also best known for his family ties until he became the nation's best free-throw shooter. The lanky kid who everyone said looked like a cross between Loren Woods and Sean Elliot, Channing Frye, is quickly going from "lanky kid who can block shots" to "lanky kid who's leading the Pac-10 in field goal percentage and coming up huge in big games · and can block shots."

And now, this team is at the top of the Pac-10 standings thanks to an Oregon loss to Cal. It's round two of the bright lights for this team, and one of the coaches who's been there before with teams like this said he thinks they're ready to handle it this time around.

"We like this position, and we battled hard to get here," said associate head coach Jim Rosborough after Saturday's game. "We've got a lot ahead of us - two very tough road games in Los Angeles against very good teams. And I think our guys like that."

This weekend said little for the Wildcats except that they could beat two teams they were expected to.

Next week, on the other hand, means everything. USC and UCLA on the road will be the two biggest games of the year, even if Arizona doesn't need to sweep to take the Pac-10 title (thanks to the tournament). But two wins will prove that when faced with the incandescence that only a city like Los Angeles and a conference like the Pac-10 can provide, this team won't wilt the second time around.