LAS VEGAS — Ten minutes away from a potentially season-saving victory against the nation's fifth-ranked team, UCLA endured a lull at the worst possible time.
Quick shots, missed box-outs and poor transition defense fueled a five-minute Arizona surge that transformed a seven-point deficit into an eight-point lead and enabled the top-seeded Wildcats to emerge with a 70-64 victory.
Whereas Arizona will spend Saturday battling either Utah or Oregon for the Pac-12 tournament title and a potential No. 1 seed, UCLA has an anxious two days ahead of it. The Bruins are at the mercy of the selection committee after completing a season in which they rebounded from a five-game losing streak over the holidays to finish fourth in the Pac-12 yet still find themselves in jeopardy of missing the NCAA tournament for the third time in six years.
"It's frustrating because I feel like if we won tonight, we were probably a sure thing," sophomore guard Bryce Alford said. "That's what hurts the most. If we won tonight, we were confident we were going to win the tournament. Now we don't have the chance for an automatic bid and we have to sit and wait. That's not fun, but we put ourselves in that situation."
Most mock brackets had UCLA as one of the last teams out of the field entering Friday's game because the Bruins (20-13, 11-7) simply don't have enough quality wins. They toppled NCAA tournament-bound Utah and Oregon at Pauley Pavilion, but those two victories, a sweep of Stanford and a rout of Long Beach State are the only wins UCLA has over RPI top 100 teams.
Where UCLA may have let its season slip away was not in the second half against Arizona on Friday but on the road weeks earlier against some of the Pac-12's lightweights. The Bruins lost winnable February matchups with Arizona State and Cal and finished only 2-8 in true road games for the season.
UCLA coach Steve Alford hopes the selection committee takes into account that the Bruins have improved considerably over the course of the regular season and have notched their three best wins in the past six weeks. They also played competitive games against Arizona twice during that stretch, though both resulted in losses.
"I like our chances," the elder Alford said. "We're like a lot of people who are going to sit and wait. I've been doing this a long time, and I'll be hard-pressed to believe there's [36] better at-large teams than what we are."
The best news for UCLA was that the final impression it left on the selection committee was as good as the Bruins could have hoped for in a loss.
They turned Arizona into a jump shooting team with a long, active 3-2 zone. They built a 47-40 lead with 12 minutes left in the second half. And they did it all with maybe their best player limited by the unwieldy mask he had to wear to protect the facial injury he suffered the previous day.
Kevon Looney's long arms and quick hands made him effective at the top of UCLA's zone, but he scored only five points in part because he was hesitant to risk getting hit in the face again while driving into traffic or attacking the offensive glass. The freshman forward also had limited peripheral vision as a result of the mask, which certainly wasn't helpful defensively.
"I didn't have a lot of time to get used to the mask. The hardest part for me was seeing on defense. I played on top of the zone, and it was hard to see screens coming up behind me or seeing the weak side or seeing rebounds coming off. It was hard. It was hard to see."
Perhaps Looney's diminished vision played a role in the missed box-outs during Arizona's 15-0 second-half surge. Five offensive rebounds by the Wildcats netted three baskets during the run, two of which had nothing to do with UCLA playing zone because they came off missed free throws.
"Rebounding was the biggest factor in that 4 to 6-minute stretch they had," UCLA guard Norman Powell said. "I think they had something like three free throw blockout rebounds and they scored on all of them."
So now all UCLA can wait and hope that the selection committee ignores the warts on their profile. The Bruins looked good enough to play in the NCAA tournament Friday night, but it's their season-long results that will be judged.
"I think everyone in the room is confident we should be able to get in," Bryce Alford said. "We're one of the best teams right now. Even though we lost today, we lost to a big-time team and we played them well. If the committee looks at the eye test, I thought we passed that today."
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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