By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

It has been Wile E. Coyote relentlessly chasing the Roadrunner and Charlie Brown still endeavoring to kick the football without Lucy yanking it aside.

"It" is Fresno State pursuing the University of Hawai'i in women's volleyball.

And, "it" hasn't been close.

If you are the Bulldogs, it has been a decade of frustration and discouragement. Perplexing, baffling, pick a word, almost any will do.

For Fresno State is 0-29 against the Rainbow Wahine and every time the Bulldogs think they have made an improvement in talent or a significant leap in quality, Hawai'i has been there to smash them like a floater to the floor.

Not since 1998 — a streak of 24 consecutive games — have the Bulldogs even taken so much as a game from the Rainbow Wahine. (The one they did get became a season highlight). Too many of the matches, however, haven't been close.

And that has been the most frustrating part of all because the Bulldogs, unlike a Boise State, Tulsa, etc. have been a pretty decent team year in and year out, numbering five 20-win seasons in the last nine years under Punahou School graduate Lindy Vivas. Some years they are the only competition UH is supposed to have in the Western Athletic Conference.

In the WAC, where UH has been and continues to be the measuring stick, the Bulldogs, for all they have had going for them, haven't measured up where it counts most against the Rainbow Wahine — in the win column.

But in a year in which the UH football team finally won at Bulldog Stadium for the first time, the Bulldog volleyball team has been sensing, indeed predicting, that tomorrow's match in Fresno will be their breakthrough, too.

"This is the year," setter Whitney Arena told The Fresno Bee last month. "This year we have six (players) who can put it all together. Hawai'i can't stop just one person."

The Bulldogs began what has become a 21-4 (9-2 WAC) season with two publicly avowed goals: make the NCAA Tournament and beat UH. Not necessarily in that order.

Never mind that UH prevailed in three games at the Stan Sheriff Center in October. The closeness — the first game was 30-28 and the last 30-26 without Christy Burnett, the Bulldogs' best player — has given Fresno State hope.

And, now that the Rainbow Wahine (23-1, 11-0 WAC) have lost their first match of the season, tumbling from No. 1 in the process, the Bulldogs have come to believe that tomorrow night in front of their fans on their campus in the aging North Gym, that UH can be taken again. That the spell will finally be broken.

They sense vulnerability and, what's more, a propitious opening to embrace history.

But, then, Wile E. Coyote and Charlie Brown were there before, too.