Stocks get their long-awaited bounce. But can it last?

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This may qualify as the most anticipated stock market rally in history.

Now, the pressure will be on the bulls to keep it from being another one-day wonder.

With blue-chip share prices at 12-year lows -- and the gloom unrelentingly thick for the last few weeks -- even some of the market’s biggest bears had been predicting a sharp snap-back, as I noted here on Monday.

We got the bounce today. The Dow Jones industrials shot up 379.44 points, or 5.8%, to 6,926.49, the biggest percentage gain since the index jumped 6.5% on Nov. 21 -- which marked the end of the autumn market meltdown.

The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 surged 43.07 points, or 6.4%, to 719.60, its largest percentage gain since Nov. 24.

Todd Clark, trading chief at Nollenberger Capital Partners in San Francisco, said that although the market has had other big, one-day bounces this year, ‘This one does feel a little different. We had good volume, which was very encouraging.’

Another positive sign: On the New York Stock Exchange, 2,917 issues rose -- the greatest number in any session since Oct. 13. That shows broad-based buying.

All the market needed was a spark, and it came from (of all places) Citigroup Inc., after the government-supported banking titan said it was profitable in January and February.

That helped drive a spectacular rally in financial stocks in general, sending an index of 81 financial issues in the S&P 500 up 15.6% -- the biggest one-day gain since Nov. 24.

Some of the buying in the financial sector almost certainly was by ‘short sellers’ who were closing out their bets that the stocks would fall even lower.

The shorts had another reason to be wary: Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters in Washington that he believed the Securities and Exchange Commission soon would reinstate the so-called uptick rule to curb short sales. . . .

Finally, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke sounded sympathetic to bending ‘mark-to-market’ accounting rules to provide relief to banks from further debilitating mortgage write-downs.

Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist for brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, said Wall Street still is in the mode of looking for a bottoming of ravaged financial stocks to signal that the rest of the market -- and the economy -- also are at or near the bottom.

If the Treasury’s long-delayed plan to deal with banks’ toxic assets is announced in the next couple of weeks, Pado said, it could give investors confidence to keep piling into battered financial issues, betting that the worst finally has past.

Still, for the moment many market pros just are hoping to string together two back-to-back winning sessions, a feat last accomplished Feb. 11-12. After that, they’ll focus on whether this is yet another rally in an ongoing bear market, or something sustainable.

A critical question for the bulls, in the short-term and the longer-term: Will there be enough of them to overcome selling from people who’ve been waiting desperately for a bounce to exit this market vale of tears, once and for all?

After the worst market losses since the 1930s, ‘The bigger issue we’ve got is people now shunning equities as an asset class,’ and wanting no more part of Wall Street, Clark said.

-- Tom Petruno