Pauley Pavilion was alive.

The white towels were waving, and the crowd was the loudest it had been all afternoon, the result of the UCLA men’s basketball team surging back from as much as a 14-point deficit to tie the game with two minutes remaining.

Yet just when momentum seemed to be on the Bruins’ side and it seemed that the team might escape with a win in the final home game of the season, turnovers put all such notions to rest.

UCLA point guard Jerime Anderson made two crucial turnovers in the final two minutes of the game while Oregon (14-14, 6-10 Pac-10) guard Tajuan Porter hit a huge 3-pointer with 50 seconds left in a 70-68 UCLA (13-15, 8-8) loss on Saturday afternoon in front of 9,073.

“Obviously that’s a very disappointing loss after falling behind by 14 and climbing our way back,” coach Ben Howland said.

After tying the game at 65-65 on a free throw, Anderson picked a poor time to commit his only two turnovers of the game.

With just more than a minute left, Anderson penetrated and attempted to find a cutting Tyler Honeycutt, yet passed the ball behind him, squandering an opportunity to take the lead.

Then, following Porter’s 3-pointer that gave Oregon the lead, Anderson threw a pass to where he thought Michael Roll was. Roll wasn’t there, and the ball ended out of bounds, prompting many fans to head to the exits.

“I just tried to swing the ball, and I just no-looked it,” Anderson said. “I thought Mike was at the spot where I threw it.”

Howland termed it an “inexplicable” pass.

“I don’t know if it’s fatigue,” Howland said. “I have no answer for that.”

The ending was not the one the Bruins and their fans would have hoped for on a day in which the seniors – Roll, forward Nikola Dragovic, forward James Keefe, guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid and guard Spencer Soo – were honored with a pregame ceremony. The members of the 1970 national championship team spoke at halftime.

From the start, the Bruins struggled to stop Oregon’s two-up zone, allowing Porter to score a game-high 29 points on 11-of-20 shooting from the field. His 7-of-9 shooting from 3-point territory was just a part of a torrid 71.4 percent (10-of-14) performance by Oregon.

Howland partly attributed Porter’s breakout scoring performance to mental breakdowns by the Bruins on defense. The Bruins were supposed to go on the top of the screens yet were forced underneath a number of times, leaving the shooters with open shots.

“Porter can really shoot,” said Roll, who tied his career high with 25 points. “We knew that coming in. It seems like everybody knows that, but he still gets it off. He’s so quick. We didn’t defend it well up there in Oregon, we didn’t defend it well here today.”

Because of a stretched zone defense and poor shot selection, in which UCLA attempted 14 3-pointers in the first half, the Bruins found themselves down 41-31 at halftime.

In the second half, the Bruins made an adjustment and put sophomore guard Malcolm Lee inside the Oregon zone, where he was able to get to the basket for a number of layups on the way to scoring 18 points on 8-of-14 shooting.

“I was just going to the open spots, the weak spots, in the defense,” Lee said.

After Oregon forward Jeremy Jacob put the Ducks ahead by 10 with a layup with 9 minutes and 11 seconds remaining, the Bruins went on a 13-3 run to tie the game on a layup by Lee in transition with 5:18 left.

However, the Bruins could never capitalize, failing to take the lead in the final minutes.

There was a missed 3-pointer by Roll five seconds into the shot clock with the game tied.

“The three that I took was a little early in the shot clock, but I felt that I was wide open and I swore that thing was in the bottom of the net and it popped out,” Roll said.

There was a turnover by Lee in which he threw the ball out of bounds because Anderson wasn’t looking in his direction.

“I was about to take the dude, and I just decided to change my mind,” Lee said. “I went to pass it, and it was a key turnover.”

All of this set up the two turnovers by Anderson that put a sour end to the 2009-2010 season at Pauley Pavilion.

“I just had two bad turnovers at the end,” Anderson said. “I think that’s what did it.”