mod_rewrite rule for exact expression not working - .htaccess

Question

I don't work to much with mod_rewrite so I could easily be just missing something simple. I want to match and replace a specific URL. The URL I want to rewrite would look like this:
http://www.sample.com/hello to http://www.sample.com/index.php?page=hello
My htaccess currently has the following rule in place:
RewriteRule ^(hello)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
However, when I implement the rule and I test it by trying to go to http://www.sample.com/hello or http://www.sample.com/hello/ I always get my 404 error document. ugh I feel like it should be simple and I must be missing something right there. Any help would be fantastic and much appreciated!
Here is my whole file for reference:
Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?sample\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !hotlink\.(gif|png) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ sample.com/hotlink.png[R,NC,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sample\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sample.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(hello)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
Thanks

Answer 1

Your code works perfeclty fine for me. Maybe you're missing
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(hello)/?$ page.php?page=$1 [L]
or maybe mod_rewrite is not installed or loaded at all.
Look for
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
in your main apache configuration file httpd.conf

Answer 2

This is one of those times...
I cleared the htaccess file and only used the following couple lines and tested it out:
Options +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
#
RewriteRule ^(hello)/?$ page.php?page=$1 [L]
I realized looking at the non custom 404 page that it referenced page.php and not index.php!
Not Found
The requested URL /page.php was not found on this server.
So turns out with all my edits I mistakenly typed page.php in the rule instead of index.php. I corrected it and the rule works. One of those times :)
Thanks all!