Maybe it would be better if most of us leap-frogged over our college years.

That would spare us some all-nighters and maybe preserve some brain cells. It would propel us into real life.

Now that's being done by the "One Tree Hill" characters. "Nobody talks about the college years of a show," says Mark Schwahn, the creator.

When the fourth season ended last June, his characters were graduating from high school. When the fifth begins tomorrow, it will have jumped ahead 4 1/2 years.

"It's breaking the mold a little," says James Lafferty, one of the stars.

Or a lot. Other shows have kept their characters in high school almost forever. "I didn't want to send them all to the same college," Schwahn says.

Now the actors can come close to playing people their own age. Lafferty is 22, Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton are 25, Chad Michael Murray and Bethany Joy Galeotti are 26.

The change is especially big for Lafferty's character, Nathan Scott. "It gives you something new to play," Lafferty says. "He's become responsible for someone else."

When "One Tree Hill" started, Nathan was rich and arrogant. A high school basketball star, he resented his half-brother Lucas Scott (Murray).

By the end of last season, the boys were friends and their dad was in prison for murder. Also, Nathan and Haley (Galeotti) had just had a baby. Now the kid is 4 years old and played by Jackson Brundage.

As last season ended, Lucas and Peyton (Burton) were in love; Brooke (Bush) and Chase Adams (Stephen Colletti) had just had sex.

Now we jump ahead, possibly with relationships unraveling. "This year, we add so many new characters," Schwahn says.

Flashbacks will tell us how they got there, but now Brooke is a fashion designer and Peyton is into music. Lucas is a novelist and basketball coach.

In many ways, that sport may be ideal for TV drama.

"Basketball is such an intimate sport," Lafferty says. "It's not like football, where everyone is padded, with helmets ... It's a finesse sport; it takes a lot of soul (and) cohesiveness."

This is more than fiction for him. Lafferty, 6 feet 2, played small forward for his high school team in Hemet, Calif. He also portrayed Steve Alford (now the Iowa coach) in the cable movie "A Season on the Brink."

That was part of the complexity of trying to be both a regular kid and an actor.

"My mom kind of found out that we could do some work as extras and I thought it would be fun," Lafferty says. So he became an extra at 6, got his first speaking role at 10, became a regular on the short-lived comedy "Emeril" at 16. Two years later, he merged acting and basketball in "One Tree Hill."

The show has had complications off-screen. Murray and Bush married, then divorced 20 months later.

Still, Schwahn considers it problem-free. "For the age of our cast, we have done so much better than other shows."

A bigger problem has involved continually contriving big plot twists. "We have been very accelerated," he says.

This was way too much to pack into a few high school years. Before the fourth season, Schwahn says, he pitched the idea of jumping ahead.

The timing was all wrong then: Two networks (UPN and WB) were merging into one; "One Tree Hill" was happy just to be brought back. Now, a year later, it makes its move.