Southern Cal fans, you're excused from this little exercise.
But everyone else, when the first star appears tonight and you make your wish, put in a word for a winning record for the UCLA football team.
The last one was in 2006, and that was only a 7-6 mark. A third consecutive losing season shouldn't happen at the second most important football school in the Southland, in the midst of, arguably, the most concentrated pool of high school talent in the country.
There's no reason in the gridiron universe that the Bruins can't soon be mentioned in Bowl Championship Series discussions, just like you-know-who across town. Nor is it very entertaining for any of us to have to sit through bad USC-UCLA games almost every season.
I wouldn't be asking for a little karmic help from the masses if I thought the Bruins weren't trying.
Rick Neuheisel was the right pick to succeed Karl Dorrell. Thou shall recruit is the college game's first commandment, and the second-year coach can match his chief competitor, Pete Carroll, each over-the-top energetic pitch for each over-the-top energetic pitch.
Best of all, was this guy born to coach Bruins, or what?
"At UCLA, the expectations are to play for first place," he said last week, referencing the 100-plus NCAA national championship teams the school has collected. "At UCLA, you can't have a swagger unless you're playing for first place."
What he doesn't have, yet, is a recent record of football achievement. But that's OK. Carroll didn't have that, either. UCLA was 13-6-1 against USC in the 1980s and 1990s.
On paper, Neuheisel's two recruiting classes are highly rated. Fine. Now go wring the potential out of their massive necks. It may be a year early, but, hey, no one is in a mood to wait.
Not the players, who claim they took their offseason seriously and exercised their muscles as hard as their coach exercised his sales skills.
"I don't know what people expect," said senior wide receiver Terence Austin. "Our goal is to win the Rose Bowl."
Said ever-exuberant senior linebacker Reggie Carter: "I'm telling everybody, jump on the bandwagon. We're going to have a lot of victories."
Where they'll come from is hard to say. It's imperative they win their first two home games, against San Diego State and Kansas State. They'll have to beat the two Washington have-nots, U-Dub and State, too. Throw in an upset here, a shocker there, and a stunner over there, and they're home free.
Talent-wise, the incoming players may trump the outgoing group, none of whom were drafted by the NFL. But new blood didn't get the Bruins respect from the Pac-10 Conference media, which rated them No. 7 in their preseason poll.
Like we said, a little outside wishing and hoping won't hurt.
"The thing we don't have is a great deal of experience," Neuheisel said. "But that's the challenge. We have to find a way."
Redshirt freshman quarterback Kevin Prince reeks of UCLA's dilemma. It may not be fair to expect a lot from him, but that's just too bad. He has to scrounge up wins -- talent or magic tricks, doesn't matter.
Neuheisel was asked if Prince deserved a long leash.
"We have to be patient across the board," said the Bruins coach, but he was just sayin'.
"We can't be 4-and-8 again, and say 'Wait until next year.' "
Until next year, though, he may need help wherever he can get it.
(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton(at)PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
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