Most of you reading this are too young to remember the dazzling City College basketball teams of the 1940's and 1950's, a bunch of five-foot-something urban runts who ran their way into sports history with their display of speed, stamina and ball-handling artistry. Their crowning achievement was the freeze, designed by Coach Nat Holman to protect narrow late-game leads.

The City College team whipped the ball back and forth and around the court and back again, mixing bullets, bounces and backhands while the crowd yelled itself hoarse and the clock ran out. We haven't seen such a skillful collective use of delay since -- at least, not until the Clinton freeze of 1998.

Merits aside, I tip my professional hat to the White House lawyers, advisers, leakers and spinners who have managed to keep the investigative ball in the air for so long. Everyone knows they are stalling, but note how spectacularly they have succeeded. They have not only mouse- and booby-trapped Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, into a string of time-eating technical fouls, but they have also firmly pinned the responsibility on him for the investigation's pace, expense and mitotic multiplication of issues.

The other morning, for example, I awoke to news that Clinton spokesmen, revved up into high dudgeon, were complaining that Mr. Starr's operation had now, outrageously, run longer than World War II. Or maybe it was the Crimean War, or the War of the Roses, or the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach played end to end.

Whatever it was, the line went, it was in sharp contrast to the 1985 investigation conducted by another independent counsel, Jacob Stein, into allegations against President Reagan's counselor, Edwin Meese 3d. Mr. Stein had many matters to investigate yet finished his job in a mere six months.

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The message from the Clinton camp was clear: the system was not the problem; Mr. Starr was. I would have been impressed, except that I had some firsthand experience with the Meese investigation.

When President Reagan named Mr. Meese to be Attorney General, a series of ethics allegations against the nominee emerged in what we now think of as the usual way, jeopardizing his confirmation by the Senate. Mr. Meese called for an independent counsel, hoping an unbiased investigation would break the momentum of the accusations and perhaps put them to rest.

This, of course, began the assemblage of attorneys. Mr. Meese hired lawyers; I was his principal counsel. (My big loss of a decade earlier -- Richard Nixon, 1974 -- had been forgiven or forgotten.) Mr. Stein hired lawyers, too -- veterans of the Watergate prosecutions. The Clinton camp was correct: there were indeed many charges to be investigated, briefed, argued and considered.

So why did it take only six months? Mainly because the Meese legal team's strategy was the opposite of the Clinton Administration's approach. Mr. Meese, awaiting Senate confirmation, had every incentive to speed things along. Also, our initial review of the accusations indicated that there wasn't an indictable offense among them.

We therefore adopted a conscious policy of total disclosure, delivering every piece of information we could to Mr. Stein's staff, faster than you can say Archibald Cox. We pressed information on the investigators that they had not yet thought to ask for. We sought no delays or other relief from any court. We claimed no privileges. The investigation ran its course without a single legal food fight.

These were in some ways the glory days of political litigation. Mr. Stein (now Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, a fact to ponder in itself) was a model of professional probity. His report went through seven drafts to insure scrupulous fairness, and it showed. When the report was published, Senator Edward Kennedy, a leading opponent of Mr. Meese's nomination, proclaimed that the opposition had had a fair shot at him and that confirmation proceedings should now resume.

The dynamics and legal substance of the process are the same now as they were then, but the politics are fundamentally different.

Mr. Starr's problem is that he can stop the legal clock almost indefinitely while he finishes investigating, but the political clock keeps ticking. By the time Mr. Starr is ready to present his case and defend it publicly, the stadium may be emptying.

The public, it has been observed, shows a near-universal contempt for politics and politicians. It is quick to tune out the tussling and name-calling that seem so important to Washington insiders; in fact, it can't even view such things for their entertainment value. Thus ''Primary Colors'' and ''Bulworth,'' despite their big stars and critical acclaim, are among the year's bigger box office bombs.

But the Clinton team's dead-on insight into this mood and cool exploitation of it are unusual. When Steve Brill's magazine, Content, revealed the shocking fact that Mr. Starr and his staff had, yes, talked to the press, it wasn't five minutes before Rahm Emanuel was in front of the White House press corps explaining piously that we were dealing here with the gravest sort of prosecutorial abuse.

And Mike McCurry, Mr. Clinton's chief spokesman, must have nerves of steel or none at all. Day after day he has had to say ''no comment'' to the same questions about the President's behavior, but you haven't seen him running to his White House colleagues in panic, insisting that the public must have an answer or there will be hell to pay.

Mr. Starr's report, when it emerges, may contain devastating details about the President. The independent counsel and his staff are smart and tough, and the White House lawn is littered with serious allegations like possible perjury and obstruction, not to mention campaign finance deformities as big as the Grand Canyon. But unless the independent counsel's office starts planning for battle with a cold-bloodedness and public affairs cunning it has not revealed so far, the report will have little impact. The President's defenders are champs at the three-dimensional game of scandal control. You may not like what they're doing, but they're awfully good at it.

That is the problem facing Mr. Starr, but a sizable problem also faces the rest of us. In defending the President by exploiting the public's sourness, the Clinton team is not simply going with the flow of reality; it is making things vastly worse.

This country's cynicism about politics is not the aged, mellow European variety. It is more like the outrage that turns away from its object because it feels helpless to take effective action. People may be predisposed to distrust politicians, but the more shamelessly, successfully and contemptuously the Clinton folks stonewall, the more certain the conviction becomes and the more remote the remedy seems.

This paralysis will not last forever. The new generation entering public life will reshape politics to its own concerns and produce good politicians to join the good politicians already at work. The problem with the skillfulness of the Clinton defense is that it delays the day when we will see the benefits of this change. I'm hoping it happens before the Great Referee in the Sky calls time and blows the whistle on me.

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