"I took the picture," Thurlby said. "But I did take the 'Lambeau Leap.' "

It is cold and dark here. Few care about any team but the beloved Packers, the only publicly owned pro sports franchise in the country with 111,613 stockholders. The NCAA has brought its regional championship to Resch Center anyway.

Tonight, sixth-seeded Texas (26-4) plays 11th-seeded Stanford (26-6) in the regional opener, followed by 14th-seeded Wisconsin (21-9) playing third-seeded Hawai'i (30-0). The winners meet tomorrow afternoon in a nationally televised match. That winner goes to the final four next week in Long Beach, Calif.

The only interest locally is in the Badgers, who took a bus 121 miles to this regional after winning their subregional in Madison last week. That gives Hawai'i, which went to Colorado and back before coming here, about an 11,000-mile lead in airtime logged.

Other than that, these teams appear very similar. Both start four underclassmen and one senior, and are exceptionally balanced. Both are familiar with going deep in the postseason. Both have all-conference junior middles (Victoria Prince and Sheila Shaw) and young, imaginative setters (Kanoe Kamana'o and Jackie Simpson).

CAYLEY THURLBY

"It's critical when you get this far that you know what's coming at you because there is very little difference in the talent of the teams now. How you prepare and what you do against the team defensively and offensively, how you make the adjustments, that will win the match."

Added Wisconsin coach Pete Waite: "The exciting part of the game is solving it when you get on the court."

UH has solved the other side 30 times this season. The rest of the country, which saw seven seniors — including All-Americans Kim Willoughby and Lily Kahumoku — leave after last season is still trying to figure out how. The 'Bows believe they know.

"We just go out and play every night like we're young and learning how to play again," Thurlby says. "Just the fun of playing volleyball. We really enjoy playing together and it's a very unselfish team. ... Everyone is very humble and very loyal to each other."

The Badgers speak warmly of their own chemistry and relish being the underdog here. They finished fourth in the Big Ten, which sent seven teams to this tournament, and led the conference in blocking.

Their losses came to the usual suspects — Penn State, Ohio State and Minnesota, who finished ahead of them — along with Kansas and Missouri the first week of the season, and Purdue and Illinois. Wisconsin offset those last two conference losses by beating then-No. 2 Minnesota.

The Badgers reappeared in the rankings this week after falling out Sept. 13. Surviving a Big Ten season and sweeping your first postseason opponents will do that.

"Every week in the Big Ten you're beating people or getting beat up by people," Waite said. "When you lose, you make adjustments. So that does make us better in the end, there's no doubt."

Wisconsin is the only team here without an NCAA title. In this wide-open volleyball season, it has as good a shot as any to get it. So does Hawai'i, which has made that discovery through a wondrous season.

"Once you start racking up the wins you're like, 'We're getting pretty close, we can do this, we just have to keep going,' " UH sophomore Alicia Arnott said. "I think that just encourages everyone to go hard on every single play because you know that your season is almost over. You don't want it to end before it has to."

Shoji, as surprised as anyone at what his team has accomplished, doesn't want it to end at all.

"At the beginning we weren't really sure of ourselves. A lot of the girls had never played on a regular basis," he said. "As we went on, people got better, they got more experience. Now we just expect to win.

"Back then it was, we were hoping to win, hoping to make a good showing, play well. Early on there was no pressure to win, but as we did win, now we expect to win. That's been the big change over the course of four months. Obviously, they have a lot of confidence. It's been building and building."