It's Clive Charles' legacy and hearing Bryan Adams on the Bluff on a Sunday afternoon. It's the miniature soccer balls the Pilots throw into the stands before the game and the half- hour they spend signing autographs afterward. It's the beat of the drums and the boys of the fireman brigade, who dash about the field with their phone numbers painted on their naked -- and nakedly optimistic -- backs.

It is . . . and it isn't.

Women's soccer at the University of Portland is the best college sports program in the Northwest, and, yes, the game-day experience in the tree-lined amphitheater on Willamette Boulevard is other-worldly. The atmosphere is almost as glorious as the barbecue brisket: family friendly, community enhancing and affordable.

But that's not all the game is on the Bluff, and the delights of the aesthetic experience shouldn't detract from the aggressive athleticism that Clive Charles first recruited to this campus and that, like flowers on his grave, continues to seize the day.

The Pilots welcomed West Virginia to Merlo Field on Sunday and smothered the nationally ranked team. In 90 minutes, Portland didn't allow the Mountaineers a chance to breathe, much less attempt a shot on goal. The Pilots, in turn, fired 23 balls at the net, circling like a school of piranha after each bloodying of the defense and attacking again.

After weekend losses by Notre Dame and UCLA, three elite teams remain undefeated and untied in women's soccer: North Carolina, Penn State and UP.

"What separates Portland from all the other teams is what they do in the final third, between the midfield and the forwards," West Virginia coach Nikki Izzo-Brown said. "Their movement and their runs off the ball are fantastic."

They are relentless, inventive, unpredictable. The Pilots' passing is so routinely flawless that they control the ball nine minutes out of every 10, probing for openings, reversing the field, waiting for the exasperated defense to wrinkle and crack. When it finally does, forwards Christine Sinclair and Megan Rapinoe see the seam long before you do and knife through it, rarely breaking stride before the ball reaches their feet.

To thwart such attacks, West Virginia jammed nine defenders into the box and sewed one of its best athletes, midfielder Ashley Banks, to Sinclair's hip.

"We watched them play the other night and noted how dominant a player she is, how deadly she is," Banks said. "My job was to disrupt her game. I'm only a sophomore. I did what I could."

Sinclair fed Rapinoe for UP's first goal, then pounced on a Mountaineer mistake for her 11th goal of the season in the Pilots' 2-0 win. Through six games, the Pilots have outscored their foes 21-1, giving up that lone goal with 26 seconds remaining in a 5-1 pasting of Wisconsin.

UP's dominance is such that keeper Cori Alexander averages one save per game. The rest of the time she might as well be sipping lemonade in a lounge chair.

"I think 'punish' is the right word," Rapinoe said. "That's our team motto. We don't just want to win; we want to punish the other team. It's not all finesse. We can dive and get dirty when we have to."

Rapinoe is a red-shirt freshman, the perfect blend of attitude and ego. She didn't play high school soccer, instead perfecting her craft on a club team based 21/2 hours from her Redding, Calif., home. She is a gifted playmaker with a knack for pulling a crossing pass out of the air and teeing it up for Sinclair, the titanium driver of college soccer.

The two of them, Sinclair and Rapinoe, haven't been together long. To borrow a phrase from the poker table, coach Garrett Smith said, they have yet to learn all of the other's "tells." Yet they make the game look easy, ridiculously and misleadingly easy, which may explain the mood at Merlo Field.

The soccer is extraordinary. The athletes are motivated on the field and uniquely accessible off it. Until the day when destiny arrives, most likely in Carolina blue, in the game for the national championship, these feel like the best days of our lives.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; Steveduin@aol.com; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201