Fixing 404 on Admin Page

/$1 got deleted from the RewriteRule...so I put it back.

Deets:
I got a 404 at http://example.com/admin/login/. When I added index.php to the url, http://example.com/index.php/admin/login/, it worked perfectly. Went through and compared the master branch's htaccess.distro.php with the one in the dev branch and found the problem.

Not sure why it was deleted in the first place?