Two minutes into last night's Western Athletic Conference volleyball match with Idaho it was clear 15th-ranked Hawai'i was better. It just took 2 hours to prove it after a second-game slumber party.

The Rainbow Wahine (16-5, 8-1 WAC) climbed back into a tie for first place with a 30-17, 25-30, 30-19, 30-22 victory. A Stan Sheriff Center crowd of 4,617 saw yet another Jekyll-and-Hyde performance, with the 'Bows appearing unbeatable early, then all too beatable for a sustained period.

They did very little wrong in Game 1, scoring the first eight points on Sarah Mason's serve. Jamie Houston and Juliana Sanders blasted at will in the front row and Mason sandwiched three consecutive aces around an Idaho timeout.

The Vandals finally found an offense. By the time they took their second timeout they had nine kills and only one error, but they were getting drilled, 21-12. Hawai'i would hit .548 for the game.

Idaho (7-14, 6-3) slashed that to .237 in Game 2, finding a rhythm with its ballhandling, getting some touches against the UH hitters — though it didn't have a block until the third game — and savoring seven kills from freshman reserve Sarah Conwell.

After 15 ties, the Vandals pulled away. The WAC team with the toughest preseason schedule outside Hawai'i — and with 11 underclassmen on its roster — would not relent. It was the first game they have taken off UH in the teams' five-match history.

The Vandals built a 22-18 advantage, with 10 points coming from the suddenly generous Rainbows in the form of missed serves and spikes, violations and ballhandling errors. Hawai'i cut its deficit in half, but could get no closer because of Conwell, who had 11 kills in the match — one more than she had in her collegiate career before last night.

"This is the first time we've ever had depth in this program — to be able to pull kids off the bench and do some different things," Idaho coach Debbie Buchanon said. "Our kids have got confidence but we also get in those ruts where we make some errors. Too many errors at the end."

What exactly happened between Games 1 and 2?

"That's what I asked my team," UH coach Dave Shoji said. "I think we had a little false sense of security. Mason's serve got us off to a great start and we won (the first game) pretty easily, but it was mostly our serving. So we think it's going to be easy and it wasn't."

His team admitted he was right.

"We lost focus because 'Mase' served like seven or eight in a row," said UH freshman Amber Kaufman. "We thought it would be easy the second game and we didn't think about it that much."

Hawai'i weathered the second-game storm and stuffed the Vandals five times in the third, using a 9-2 run to surge ahead 23-13 and regain control.

UH simply outlasted Idaho in the end, in part with a defense that dug 72 balls. Five 'Bows finished with double-digit digs. Setter Kanoe Kamana'o gathered 17 to move ahead of Lily Kahumoku and into sixth on the career list, with 1,112.

Houston, sixth in the country in kills, again led UH with 24, while Mason added 19. The two left sides also had 75 percent of the team's hitting errors and 70 percent of its swings as the passers again struggled to get the ball to Kamana'o near the net.

When they did, Idaho had no answer for the UH offense. Middles Juliana Sanders (11 kills) and Kari Gregory (7) went 18 for 30 with a single error and, in an all-or-nothing performance, Kaufman was 8 for 12 with three errors, hitting from every inch of the net.

Hawai'i plays San Jose State (14-9, 5-5) tomorrow at 5 p.m. The Rainbow Wahine go back on the road next week, playing at Nevada Thursday and Utah State next Saturday.

Reach Ann Miller at amiller@honoluluadvertiser.com.