Alaska Airlines Arena serves as Ben Howland’s personal house of horrors, haunted by the ghosts of UCLA teams both talented and thin that failed to escape Washington’s rowdy home arena with a win.

It has been seven years since UCLA won an away game at Washington, the last coming in Howland’s first season as UCLA coach.

More important to this season’s Bruins (12-9, 5-4 Pac-12) is the fact that they have yet to win a game outside of Southern California.

A win tonight against the Huskies would be a nice start.

Road victories will be necessary if UCLA still wants to contend in the conference race.

That remains a possibility since the Pac-12 season’s only consistent trait has been its parity.

UCLA, in a three-way tie for fifth place, is just two games behind the leaders at the halfway point of the conference season.

“It still gives us some hope,” redshirt sophomore center Anthony Stover said.

“Every day when I talk to my teammates we say we’re right here, we’re still in the middle of the pack, and we can still break out and hit first place.”

First place is where the Huskies (14-7, 7-2) sit, tied with California for the Pac-12 lead. Tonight’s game, which tips at 6:05 p.m. on ESPN, marks the second straight that the Bruins will play against a conference co-leader after UCLA beat Colorado at the Sports Arena on Saturday.

Howland praised Washington coach Lorenzo Romar for turning the Huskies, back-to-back Pac-10 Tournament champions, into a perennial Pac-12 contender.

Romar was an assistant coach on the UCLA team that won the 1995 NCAA title in Seattle, now the city where he has developed one of the strongest home-court advantages in all of college basketball.

Few have had the experience inside Alaska Airlines Arena that Joshua Smith has.

The sophomore center grew up 20 miles from Seattle in Kent, Wash., and went to the building known as “Hec-Ed” for Huskies games “for as long as I can remember,” cheering Washington on as they took on schools like UCLA.

“U-Dub, they always sell out,” Smith said. “Crazy students who are excited for the games – it’s a really different atmosphere there since coach Romar’s been the coach there. He’s kind of turned it into a basketball school. It makes it really hard.”

Smith returned last year and received a cold welcome from the “Dawg Pack” during his first game there in a UCLA uniform. He went on to put up 12 points and 16 rebounds in the Bruins’ 70-63 loss.

Smith’s mother, Tracey, already has 25 tickets for the game.

But there won’t be too much time for a reunion as Smith will be in Seattle on a business trip for a game of utmost importance to UCLA’s slim postseason chances.

He’ll still get a chance to cure some of the homesickness that ails him.

“I’ll always be homesick,” Smith said. “I love living down here, I love going to school down here, but at the end of the day I’m from there, I was raised there, that’s where my family is, so to a certain extent I’ll be homesick.

“It was fun last (year). But it would have been better if we would have gotten a win.”

The “Bruin Road Show” hasn’t had much luck when it comes to winning actual road games.

A post-halftime collapse against Oregon on Jan. 21 was the point when UCLA’s woes away from home came to a head. A win there could have had them challenging the Huskies for the No. 1 spot in the conference standings.

“It’s something that we definitely look back on,” redshirt sophomore forward David Wear said. “If we didn’t (give up that lead to Oregon) it’s a game that we should have won.”

Focus was renewed during their last two-game swing, when the Bruins put together back-to-back games playing better after the halftime break.

That focus will have to carry over into this week’s road trip if the Bruin wants to shake off some of the problems that have haunted them the most.

“(Beating Washington) is something that’s really serious, that I think we’re all really focused on,” senior guard Jerime Anderson said.