Under the category of being careful of what you wish for on Christmas Eve, we offer you the example of the Arizona State football team that asked for a little too much.

Not content merely to be leading the University of Hawai'i 10-3 at halftime of the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl last night, some of the Sun Devils said they were hardly able to wait for the second half, so expectant were they of shutting down quarterback Colt Brennan and the Warriors without a second-half touchdown as well.

"We were thinking we were going to go out there in the second half and do the same exact thing we did to them in the first half," safety Josh Barrett said.

Big mistake.

Almost as fast as you could say, "bah, humbug," Brennan and the nation's No. 1-rated passing offense disabused the Sun Devils of that notion going 80 yards in 2 minutes, 31 seconds for the first score of a 38-point second half en route to a 41-24 victory.

The Warriors' most eye-opening second half bombardment of the year began with four consecutive first downs and made for a fitting exclamation point on an 11-3 season that matches the most victories in school history.

If it was Brennan's last appearance in a UH uniform — and he said it would take the prospect of "a situation impossible to turn down; I mean really impossible" — to keep him from returning, then it was at least a memorable departure for the faithful among the 40,623 on hand at Aloha Stadium.

If he ends up bypassing early entry into the NFL draft — as you would hope he might unless the NFL advisory panel certifies the prospect of a big-money first-round selection — then Brennan launched his 2007 Heisman Trophy candidacy with a flourish on ESPN.

Brennan's long-awaited arrival into the NCAA record book for single-season touchdown passes, shattering David Klingler's 16-year old record of 54 by four, came in a second half where the UH quarterback threw five of them and passed for a career high 559 yards overall. Two touchdowns each going to Ryan Grice-Mullins and Jason Rivers, who, by the way, are eligible to return and complement Brennan again next year just in case the thought has slipped his mind.

Most quarterbacks would treasure Brennan's first half statistics — 14 of 19 passes for 170 yards. For Brennan, as we have come to learn, that was merely a warmup on a night when he would complete a whopping 82.6 percent of his second half attempts — 19 of 23 — for 389 yards and make it look almost routine.

"Probably the best (second half) I've had," Brennan allowed. And a timely one, too, clearing away as it did the lingering taste of the 35-32 loss to another Pac-10 team, Oregon State 22 days earlier in Halawa. A game in which the Warriors managed but one second half touchdown and Brennan suffered a rare misfire with the game on the line.

So, when UH opened this one with just a second-quarter field goal to show for the first half offensively, you could say there was something to prove. Brennan did.

"No way we wanted to go out like we did against Oregon State," Brennan said. No way, with so much to prove and such a huge stage on which to do it, did Brennan or the Warriors plan to leave it this way. "We knew we were better than that, that we stopped ourselves and we had a lot to prove."

Which they set out doing from the first play of the second half, one of four consecutive first downs. In that Brennan was, as ASU coach Dirk Koetter would say, "(he) was everything they said he was."

And his receivers, especially Rivers, were even more.

Of course, not all the Sun Devils were so sure hopes of carrying over the first-half containment of Brennan and the UH were rooted in reality. "I thought, if we were going to have a chance to stay in the game with them we were going to have to score more points," said ASU quarterback Rudy Carpenter. "That offense can really put up a lot of points on you in a hurry."

A lesson, like being careful what you ask for, some of the Sun Devils learned the hard way this holiday season.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.