MOSCOW, Idaho — The Western Athletic Conference football season opens Saturday, and nowhere across the nation's most geographically scattered league will you find more excitement about it than here in Palouse farm country.

Even with an 0-3 start, there is palpable enthusiasm for Idaho's first game as a WAC member.

From the prospect of Idaho's first home football sellout in more than a decade, to the ever-present "Crashin' the WAC" posters in the windows of area businesses, the conference's ninth and most recent member is fired up about the game with the University of Hawai'i and what it represents.

While people in Fresno, Calif., and elsewhere cast longing glances at the Mountain West Conference, folks here warmly embrace the WAC. While fans in Hawai'i take 27 years of WAC membership for granted, fans here are charged up about their new home and future possibilities.

After too many seasons of trying to find Middle Tennessee, Arkansas State and Louisiana-Monroe, much less working up enthusiasm for playing them, the Vandals see association with Hawai'i and Fresno State as an answer to a prayer.

"We finally have a legitimate chance to succeed as a Division I-A football-playing institution," said Rob Spear, UI's athletic director.

That surge of hope is reflected in a 15 percent hike in season ticket sales and rise in sponsorships, IU officials say. "We surveyed our season ticket buyers on why they bought this year and the WAC was a major reason," said Brian Bartels, UI ticket manager.

To understand the excitement hereabouts you have to know the winding and, at times, seemingly dead-end road the Vandals have traveled to get here.

Once a member of the Pacific Coast Conference, the forerunner of the Pac-10, Idaho long ago rubbed shoulder pads with Southern California and UCLA and banged leather helmets with Stanford, Washington and the like. But that ended in the late 1950s with a streak of four winless conference seasons, and the Vandals were left to find their level in the Division I-AA Big Sky Conference. Eventually they found their way to I-A in 1996 with the Big West.

When the Big West dropped football after the 2000 season, Idaho had its football team playing in the travel-challenged Sun Belt and all its other sports competing in the Big West, a predicament that, had it gone on much longer, might have meant the end of I-A football here.

So, when the WAC suddenly found itself with some membership pukas following the departures of Tulsa, Rice, Southern Methodist, etc., it was the providential opening the Vandals had been hoping for.

For the Vandals, Saturday's game with UH isn't just about opening a season, but a new life.

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