Monday, March 1, 1999 | 10:37 a.m.
Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.
Selective memory can come in handy if only because it allows you to continually replay the good times while disregarding the bad.
For those UNLV basketball fans caught up in this mind game, they've been able to amuse themselves for a calendar year by rerunning the 1998 Western Athletic Conference tournament through the thin and thin of this 1998-99 season. They've managed to stay ever-optimistic simply because they can recall how good the Rebels looked for a single week in March of '98.
That week was fun, but in retrospect it may only have been a glitch.
It was a year ago this week that UNLV charged through the WAC tourney and earned a berth in the hallowed NCAA Tournament. Playing four games in five days, the Rebels handled Hawaii, upset fifth-ranked Utah, slipped past Fresno State and upset No. 20 New Mexico.
Four wins by a total of 23 points and the city was going crazy. The Rebels -- and coach Bill Bayno -- were at the threshold of the promised land, sweeping the WAC's tough tournament field and advancing to the glory of the Big Dance.
That sensational run negated the bulk of a 1997-98 season that, prior to the conference tournament, had been one to forget. The Rebels came into the event with a 16-12 record and having been creamed by every prominent non-conference opponent they had faced, including Kansas, Michigan, Rhode Island, Syracuse and UCLA.
Guess what? Today the Rebels are 16-11 and, just like a year ago, still licking their wounds from a regular season that failed to match expectations. They were beaten in their pivotal non-conference games and although they shared the WAC's Mountain Division title they concluded their regular season by losing to one of only four teams that didn't qualify for this week's WAC swan song at the Thomas & Mack Center.
They're sputtering, as demonstrated once again Saturday night when they lost 76-73 to a Wyoming team that was playing only for pride. That loss, on top of all the others this season, underscored once again the notion that except for that one week last year the Rebels have been sputtering for a long, long time.
In fact, they have yet to really turn the corner despite reaching the intersection two or three times in Bayno's four-season tenure. They were 20-13 in 1996-97 but seemed to regress the following season until that magnificent romp through the WAC tournament. That "up" was followed by the "down" of losing to Princeton in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, and this season has been one of mostly disappointments in spite of what the team's faithful have had to say about it.
They must have choked when even Bayno admitted after the Wyoming loss that his team's only hope of going to the NCAA Tournament is to win the WAC tourney championship. That's an assessment that has more or less been true for the past six weeks, although the team's apologists have had a rough time swallowing the hard, cold facts when they've been written here.
It is possible, however, that reaching the tournament's title game might be good enough for an NCAA invite. The NCAA is going to take Utah and one other WAC team, and it'll be one that makes it to the league's championship game.
If it's the Rebels, selective memory will be back for an encore and all will be forgiven.
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