Walk inside Sancet Field on a weekday afternoon during practice, and you can sense a difference.

More players line up for early batting practice. Fielders hustle after balls. Catchers' mitts pop like a fusillade down in the bullpen.

This year, there's something new in the Arizona baseball team's late-season practices: hope. And it's not the preseason kind of hope, the kind that wafts in with the early spring to infuse optimism into teams that wind up with losing seasons.

This year, the Wildcats are in the hunt again. With 12 games left in the Pacific-10 Conference schedule, they're just two games back of Stanford entering a weekend series with the Cardinal.

Compare that to this time last year, when Arizona was two games below .500 in the conference, and headed for an eventual seventh-place tie, and the difference becomes clear.

The players feel it, too. Especially the older guys, the ones who knew the futility of the years before head coach Andy Lopez was hired to rebuild the program a little over a year ago.

Guys like Brian Pemble, a fifth-year Wildcat and Tucson native, who celebrated his 23rd birthday yesterday. "There's a whole different feeling coming out to the ballpark," he said. "The team wants to win, we feel like we can win every time out there. There's a whole different aura."

Unlike the rest of the team, Pemble remembers playing a series that still meant something late in April ÷ a series like the one the Wildcats begin today, in which they'll fight it out for the Pac-10 lead.

"My freshman year, four years ago, we played a series up at ASU to get us into the (regional) tournament," Pemble remembers. "That was a big series, and really, you know what, this is probably going to be the next biggest one for me because we haven't really been in the hunt since then."

Even Lopez, who won a national title at Pepperdine, seems relieved that the ship has finally begun to right itself after a year of pulling on the rudder.

"It's nice to be able to talk about the fact that it's an important weekend in terms of who's going to win the conference," he said. "That means we're involved in it, which is really nice."

This team thinks it can contend, and not just for the conference title. Listen to the talk around the dugout, and the word "Omaha" comes up ÷ the site of the College World Series, which the Wildcats haven't played in since their last national championship in 1986.

"Our main goal is to make it to Omaha, but we want to win the Pac-10, too," Anderson said.

Those seem like bold words from somebody who hasn't seen an Arizona team finish with a winning conference record in his UA career. But those are the kind of goals Lopez has set for his young team, which boasts only two seniors öö Pemble and Wes Zlotoff.

This team is no longer rebuilding. It wants to win something that matters, whether it's a Pac-10 title or its fourth national championship.

For Pemble, the big wins can't come soon enough.

"My freshman year was four years ago öö 1998-99 öö that was the last time that we made it and we were two and out. I want to go back and win some games," he said. "At least for me, it's no longer nice just being there. I want to go back and win."