Magic Belies Myth -- If It Mattered What They Were, Damon Huard And Julie Lorrain Would Be The Perfect Cliche - The College Quarterback With The Cheerleader Girlfriend. What Matters To Them, However, Is Who They Are.

He is the quarterback of the Washington Huskies. Tall, with iron hands and forearms like mountain bluffs. As he throws the winning touchdown pass, he is, at once, the hero, the leader, the conqueror.

She is a cheerleader. Thick hair, tanned legs, perfect makeup. She is his most faithful supporter.

Damon Huard and Julie Lorrain, the quarterback and the cheerleader, the living cliche, throwbacks to a time unaware of political correctness. They are the couple of adolescent mythology.

All of which makes her cringe and him blush.

"I've heard my fair share of cracks about the quarterback and the cheerleader," Huard said. "But that's not us. It has nothing to do with how we met, who we are or why we're together. We're best friends. We're just two people who have a lot of feelings for each other."

For the longest time, she paid no attention to him because a friend had expressed a romantic interest in Huard. That interest produced nothing. All Huard noticed was Lorrain, the strongest, prettiest girl in the weight room.

"She's a great dancer, you know," Huard said. "She has these amazing, buff calves. She's by far the best one in the squad."

She phoned Huard, the first time, at his lowest moment last season. He had been taken out of the UCLA game with bruised ribs. The Huskies had lost and Huard was at home taking painkillers.

"May I speak to Damon?" she asked.

"Damon who?" his younger brother Brock teased, making an already anxious Lorrain even more nervous.

Her voice belonged to a familiar face. Damon always had made a point to say "hi" when he saw her lifting weights. Huard had mentioned his attraction to a mutual friend, tight end Mark Bruener. The grapevine worked. Mutually interested, but equally afraid, neither was confident enough to call.

For courage, she called her parents, who convinced her this was a good boy - they could tell because of the way he answered interviewers - and that if it was her sorority's dance, she should call him.

Huard was elated but surprised by the call.

"I didn't think she wanted to go out with a dufus like me," Huard said.

Never having read about him, she was only generally aware of who he was until the night they danced and kissed on the porch. There was rarely a day they did not speak thereafter. Huard spent his summer savings on romantic dinners. Lake Union was their favorite place. Once he splurged at the Space Needle.

Over dinner he learned that her father, like his, was a high-school football coach. That at one time, the two fathers both coached in the Yakima Valley. That she was a ball girl, as he was a ball boy.

He learned she could throw a mean spiral and also turn a flawless pirouette. She learned Huard's most remarkable attribute was his laugh. When it comes, he can hardly contain it. He lowers his head, hiding his face before it bursts through. It always makes her laugh even if nothing is funny.

Over the months, they discovered he is punctual to the minute; she usually needs an extra 15. He is a lover of mud pies and anything deep-fried; she is a health-food fanatic. He wants four kids; she thinks two is plenty. She adores attention; he loves to give it.

"I really can't see him happier with anyone else," Bruener said.

Huard is a football player, a lot Lorrain is generally leery of. Her father Vince Lorrain, a former defensive back for the Huskies in the 1960s, coached at Selah High School. She grew up around football players, worked as a ball girl for her father, played catch on the sideline with injured players. She ran through the Husky tunnel, with her father, long before Huard did.

"Being around them," she said, "you find out football players are the biggest jocks with the biggest egos."

But Huard, she said, was different. Sincere to a fault. So much so, teammates call him gullible. Bruener told Huard before his first date that Lorrain was 25 (she is 22), had been in the Peace Corps for four years, and had difficulty speaking English. Huard believed the concoction.

"How was I supposed to know?" Huard said.

If he ever had an ego, it was busted last season when Eric Bjornson was made the starting quarterback. Huard would have confronted his doubts and fears alone if not for Lorrain. The comfort she gave him, he said, told him she was for real.

"I am proud of what he has done," Lorrain said. "But I date him because of who he is. Playing football is here and gone."

She never considered Washington's starting quarterback would be such a deft housekeeper. His bed is always made, his laundry clean. He washes the dishes and cooks, too.

"He's very neat," she said. "I didn't expect that."

Huard, 21, admits to living a sheltered life dominated by football, to being shy about girls and having little hope for many years of finding the girl for him. In a questionnaire answer printed in last year's media guide, Huard mentioned the person he would most like to meet: "My wife."

"I didn't have much of a social life," Huard said. "Maybe if you're Napoleon Kaufman, girls come to you. But I don't think I'm such a stud everyone wants to go out with me. I'm not very aggressive."

Such is his affection for Lorrain, that it has become the object of jokes. Huard, Bruener said, is "by far" one of the most devoted boyfriends he knows.

"He will do anything for her," Bruener said. "If he's going to be a little late, he calls ahead to let her know."

And when she saw him crumpled under a pile of USC tacklers, she was ready to pummel those Trojans herself.

"I shouted `get off of him!' " Lorrain said. "They had to calm me down. I guess it wouldn't have looked good for some girl to come running out there."

Huard gave little thought to cheerleaders before he met Lorrain. If they were cute, he would look their way. But mostly they were the seemingly inconsequential background to every football game he had played since middle school. The girl he dated in high school was also an athlete.

Lorrain played tennis and volleyball at Eisenhower High School in Yakima. Her father taught her to throw a football and run a pass pattern. They still discuss plays and strategies on the phone after a big game. If she had been a boy, she surely would have been a quarterback instead of a ballet dancer. Her older brother Mike is the brain. She is the jock. She thinks of cheerleading as a sport. Now, so does Huard. Some drills, he said, are harder than his football plays.

"It's demanding in an athletic way," Lorrain said. "We do a lot of stunting, flying through the air. I took up cheerleading because I love to dance and I love my school."

That is her justification for what she does on Saturday afternoons, what some consider a bane to the cause of feminism.

"It depends on the cheerleader and the squad," Lorrain said. "Some squads just want to wear tight sweaters and fluff their hair. But the squad at the `U' is not like that. Every single girl is an athlete.

"Yes we do wear short skirts. We're concerned about how we look, but I think most everyone in society is. We're out there to do our stunts and to support the university."

Once during a snap count at practice, Bruener and Bjornson noticed Huard fixed in a stare toward the sideline. Huard, over center, was not smiling at Bjornson, but past him, where the cheer squad was rehearsing.

"They spend a lot of time together," Bjornson said. "If she shows up in the weight room . . . For lack of a better word, the workout comes to a screeching halt. Like we'll be benching. `All right Damon, get set.' And the next second, it's `where the hell did Damon go?' He'll be over there riding the exercise bike next to her. And it's not even on our workout plan."

Love lives at Husky Stadium. Two people framed by a stereotype, living a real relationship.

Huard said he will never hear the end of it when teammates and coaches read this. But the jokes will be forgotten in short time. She will not.