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Senior linebacker Spencer Havner closed out his collegiate career by leaving the UCLA program mor

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UCLA's 50-38 victory over Northwestern gave UCLA only its seventh 10-win season in the history of

EL PASO, Texas — After two years of embarrassing bowl losses, questions about his leadership, and mediocre results on the field, senior quarterback Drew Olson packed up his locker for the last time, leaving UCLA just as he envisioned – better off than he found it.

“I, we, accomplished our mission,” Olson said.

After two years of off-season mental torture after believing his team left something on the football field, senior safety Jarrad Page is approaching this off-season with something he hasn’t hand since he was a freshman – peace of mind.

“We finally completed a season, finally,” Page said.

After two years of bitter locker rooms and players screaming at one another, senior offensive guard Robert Cleary paused at his locker Friday afternoon and soaked up some unfamiliar sounds this time of year – laughing, camaraderie, sounds of victory.

“People are talking, joking around and laughing, when last year everyone was yelling in each other’s faces,” Cleary said. “This is the best thing that could have happened, no matter how it came or what it took.”

UCLA’s 50-38 victory over Northwestern at the 72nd annual Vitalis Sun Bowl on Friday at Sun Bowl Stadium may not have been pretty, and in fact was quite bizarre, but it provided the Bruins everything that their previous two bowl games could not.

It ensured UCLA (10-2, 6-2 Pac-10) a 10-win season, the first since 1998 and only the seventh in the 87-year history of the program.

It ended a dubious recent bowl game history, which included embarrassing losses at the not-so-prestigious Silicon Valley Bowl and the Las Vegas Bowl, and delivered to UCLA coach Karl Dorrell his first victory in the month of December.

But most importantly, Friday’s victory validated a season in which the Bruins ascended from the level of mediocrity, and now have a bowl game trophy with a permanent residence in the J.D. Morgan Center to prove it.

Unlike the last two years, in which any growth UCLA exhibited during the regular season was stunted in December, this year’s Bruin team preserved that progress on Friday, delivering to next year’s team some long-awaited momentum.

“The program is definitely in better hands,” senior linebacker Spencer Havner said. “And that’s the only thing I wanted all year, to bring some respect back to us.”

“They’ve done a great job getting the respect level back in the program,” Dorrell said. “Getting off the heels of a 6-6 season the previous year is a great accomplishment and a step forward.”

The Bruins just ended up taking a roundabout way of getting there.

In the previous 11 games, UCLA had come to rely heavily on Olson, tight end Marcedes Lewis and running back Maurice Drew.

The trio reserved their worst collective performance for Friday’s bowl game.

After having thrown only three interceptions in 354 passes this season, Olson threw three interceptions in four passes in the first quarter alone, the last of which Northwestern’s Nick Roach ran back for a 35-yard touchdown to give the Wildcats a 22-0 lead. The most points Northwestern (7-5, 5-3 Big 10) had scored in the first quarter this season before Friday was 10.

“It seemed like just a fluke,” Olson said. “But I wasn’t worried.”

Nor was Olson worried that Lewis caught Dorrell by surprise with a bucket of Gatorade just as many times as he hauled in a reception on Friday (once), which was on a two-point conversion.

And even with Drew succumbing to a left shoulder injury on a kickoff return midway through the first quarter, running backs Chris Markey and Kahlil Bell more than admirably assumed command of the Bruins’ rushing attack. The duo combined for 294 of a team season-high 310 rushing yards while punching it into the endzone twice, and were rewarded for their efforts by being named Co-Most Valuable Players.

“They did a great job,” Drew said. “They went out there and took it upon themselves (to get us back).”

Though next year’s media guide will confirm that Friday’s 22-point comeback was the largest deficit the Bruins had to overcome this season, it didn’t have the same emotion of UCLA’s four other fourth-quarter comebacks.

Perhaps that’s because this comeback was two quarters too early, as theBruins took a 29-22 advantage into halftime and never yielded the lead back to Northwestern.

“That’s good that it came early,” Olson said. “We didn’t want to wait. That was the beauty of it. I hate coming back, but the way we responded, that’s what makes this one so much better.”

The victory was finally sealed when sophomore receiver Brandon Breazell returned an onside kick 42 yards for a touchdown with 2:24 remaining in the game.

He sealed it again with 18 seconds left when he returned another onside kick for a touchdown, this time scampering 45 yards past a bumbling and stumbling Northwestern special teams unit.

“That was crazy,” Page said. “It was the exact same play. I’ve never seen that before.”

Such an ending was befitting for a game that the Sun Bowl had never seen before in its 72-year history, a game that broke as many Sun Bowl records as dropped balls by Wildcat receivers, which is to say, many.

UCLA and Northwestern combined to break the record for most first-quarter points combined (29), most first-half points combined (51), most first downs combined (57), and most points combined (88).

The Bruins also did some individual rearranging of the record book, with Olson tying the Sun Bowl record with three touchdown passes, scoring the most points (50) and recording the largest comeback (22) in the bowl game’s history.

But the single-game comeback may pale in comparison to the turnaround UCLA achieved this season.

Since the 66-19 debacle at USC back on Dec. 3, Dorrell had stressed to his team it still had the potential to finish the season on a positive note, to continue to generate the momentum it had for the better part of the 2005 season.

But in order to do so, according to players, it was required the Bruins win this game.

“This game showed that guys will want to be here, and that’s the mentality that guys have bought into this year, that they want to be around,” Cleary said. “We’ve gotten rid of the guys that don’t want to be here. You had some guys that didn’t want to be here, and now they’re gone. We have some guys that want to be here now.”

Guys who enter next season with a feeling that has been absent from the program the last two seasons – as winners.

“There’s a lot of things the seniors wish we could have done in our time here, but at least we took a program that was on the downside and turned it up, and it’s cool to be sitting here on the upswing,” Cleary said.

“This is the last game I’ll ever get to play in. I went out a winner, and now I get to tell my kids that.”