The Sports Bar in downtown Moscow, normally a raucous sort of place, fell to a surreal silence the minute Judge Lance Ito sat down behind his well-worn bench.


Then: Not guilty. Not guilty.


Instantaneously, the bar rang with the kind of wild howling and frantic cheering usually reserved for football and hockey.


But this was O.J. and the murder "trial of the century" in the United States.


"People in the U.S. are crazy, they have nothing better to do," said Alexander Nikolayev, 24, an Inkombank bond trader. Around him were opinionated financial wizards from Russia's up-and-coming youth, casually munching on chicken wings and French fries.


"If I saw my wife with another man, I would have killed her, too," said Yana Stokrot "I wouldn't have killed them, I would have asked for an alimony reduction," said the economy-minded Nadya Nikiforova, 27, who works for the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.


For Americans, letters from home, phone calls from family and snippets of CNN have dripped O.J. like a steady intravenous tube for more than a year.


"I think it's the wrong decision," said Travis Towe, 28, of Gainesville, Georgia, who works in Moscow for a venture capital firm.


"O.J. was able to afford a dream team of lawyers, and 99.9 percent of Americans can't afford that dream team of lawyers."


David Horne of Atlanta owes his stepmother a call. "When I get home, one of the first things I am going to do is call my stepmother," said the 32-year-old paging-equipment executive. "She said from day one that he didn't do it."


Jennifer Templeton held her hands over her mouth as the verdict was read. Her post-verdict posture -- arms thrust skyward -- was more an expression of relief than anything else.


"The best thing about this verdict is that it's not going to be on TV any more," said Templeton, 24, advertising director of the Soviet Wings hockey team. "The best thing about being here is that I didn't get hourly updates."


But for Russians, the O.J. trial, covered only sporadically in the Russian media and not at all on Tuesday evening's newscasts, still provided a bigger-than-life glimpse of America.


"The judicial process is too open," said Andrei Panov, 20, a math student. "It should have been more closed. It looked like an advertising campaign."


Like any good advertising campaign, it went on and on and on, much to Panov's dislike. "Everything was known from the very beginning," he said. "It should have been simple."


And though "McDonaldization" has become a buzzword of late around Moscow, Panov does not foresee the "Simpsonization" of the justice system.


"There has never been anything like this in Russia," he said. "And I think it will be a long time before we see anything similar."