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At precisely noon on a chilly, gray day at old Mac Court, a charter bus delivering the UA basketball team came to a stop.

You can't miss it; the place hasn't changed in decades.

About 40 paces from the arena's front door, the Masonic Cemetery, in its 169th year, still holds the remains of Eugene Skinner, this city's ranking pioneer legend.

On the back lot of Mac Court is the treasured piece of land where "National Lampoon's Animal House'' showed Otter and Boon spraying golf balls into the backside of an ROTC officer's horse, thereby saving frat buddy Flounder an ignominious scolding.

The walls to the 81-year-old arena are slate-gray and dirty. All the doors are a faded green. And if you don't quickly pump a fistful of change into the ageless parking meters — 25 cents gets you 10 minutes — you inevitably receive a $17 ticket inside a lemon-yellow envelope.

UA interim coach Kevin O'Neill last made the Mac Court bus ride 19 years ago. The Wildcats were ranked No. 1 that season (and the season before) and O'Neill was in the final stages of becoming The Young Coach on every athletic director's emergency-hire A-list.

The good, old days, right?

"I don't remember if we won or lost,'' O'Neill said Friday. "But I do remember it was awfully hot in the locker room.''

Whoever controls (or doesn't control) the thermostat in the ancient building always seemed to set it at 80 degrees, maybe 85, if only to get Lute Olson to strip down to shirtsleeves. Mac Court has been the only stop on the Pac-10 road that Mr. GQ regularly let them see him sweat.

But it's not the heat that is the story here. The story is how much the Pac-10 has changed since O'Neill last was on Arizona's bench in 1988-89.

Of course he doesn't remember the Ducks.

The Pac-10 was such a chummy place in the '80s and early '90s that Oregon was seemingly content to keep on the job for nine years a coach, Don Monson, whose best record was 16-13.

With O'Neill on the bench, Arizona thumped the Ducks in Eugene 78-57 in 1989, a season in which Monson coached Oregon to an 8-21 record — and yet was still given three more years in an attempt to get it right.

The Ducks didn't go to a single NCAA tournament in Monson's nine years — didn't come close — and yet every time Arizona marched through Mac Court, winning by such ridiculous scores as 104-56 — Oregon's inaction mirrored much of the rest of the league.

So you can forgive O'Neill if he takes one look around this ancient edifice tonight and marvels at how things have changed in Pac-10 basketball.

Everybody has fought back since Arizona put together back-to-back 17-1 conference seasons that the young O'Neill came to expect as routine.

The Ducks are so intent on playing winning basketball that they pay their coach, the theatrical Ernie Kent, about $1.3 million annually and — no kidding — seem to be ready to jettison him a year after he took Oregon to the Elite Eight.

Oregon is in the process of completing a $200 million arena project that would (say it ain't so) raze historic Mac Court and build something to suit Nike's Phil Knight and the other high-rollers willing to pay whatever is necessary to avoid another Don Monson era.

Kent and the Ducks have underachieved this year, failing to challenge for the Pac-10 title despite deploying four returning starters, all of them equipped with some of the most feared three-point shooting touches in this or any country.

And the unappreciated Kent has gone 29-8, 26-9 and 22-8 since the turn of the century.

Oh, how the league has changed since KO last toured Mac Court.

Cal, for example, still owes Mr. Beige, Ben Braun, about $3.5 million through 2011. But Cal is about to finish in ninth place, attendance has dropped to about 75 percent of capacity, and Cal athletic director Sandy Barbour last week told Bay Area dailies "we are talented enough to have a better record.''

Cal is just a few years removed from a $60 million arena project and four NCAA tournament appearances. It wants more and it wants it now. The league has become ridiculously difficult.

Before leaving Oregon State's Gill Coliseum on Thursday, UA senior Jawann McClellan noted how pleased he was that the Wildcats had not "played down'' to Oregon State's level.

It seemed like a quote out of a 1989 Arizona locker room. Today, except for the stop in Corvallis, the league plays up, not down.

It's going to be awfully hot at Mac Court again tonight, and it will have nothing to do with the thermostat.