As it turns out, it was altogether fitting that the University of Hawai'i-Nebraska volleyball meeting — it was hard to call it a "match" — was aired by Nebraska Education Television Sunday.

Talk about an education, the Rainbow Wahine were schooled in passing, serving, poise, you name it.

It took the Rainbow Wahine 10 hours to get to Lincoln, Neb. and just 1 hour, 34 minutes to get swept right back out of the Devaney Center. That's a time frame usually reserved for UH whipping up on, say, the likes of Idaho or Eastern Washington. A humbling along the lines of what former UH assistant coach Charlie Wade used to describe as "uno, dos, adios!" when the Rainbow Wahine were doing the shellacking.

So, you hope the lessons learned in Lincoln against the nation's No. 1 team are taken both to heart and onto the Stan Sheriff Center floor Friday night. Because where the Rainbow Wahine have usually been able to come back from a rare non-conference defeat and immediately go back to chewing up Western Athletic Conference competition this time it is different.

This time they will be tested, immediately. Instead of San Jose State, Boise State or Louisiana Tech as confidence-restoring punching bags, the Rainbow Wahine (16-4), still clinging to No. 11 in the polls, find New Mexico State waiting for them. Make that the No. 13-ranked Aggies, who have been steadily moving up to a school-record high since losing a five-game, three-hour-plus match to UH in Las Cruces, N.M. five weeks ago. A New Mexico State team that, by the way, got a couple more points out of its loss to Nebraska than UH did.

But the Aggies emerged with more than a flimsy statistical bragging right. NMSU (19-3) came out of its loss to make the most of the lessons learned the hard way, winning 11 of the 12 matches since Lincoln. The one loss being UH.

"I think the thing is playing a team of that caliber makes you better," NMSU coach Mike Jordan said. "When we played Nebraska, I thought the next two weeks we played our best volleyball of the season afterward."

You would hope the same will be true for the Rainbow Wahine. There is a reason head coach Dave Shoji took his team to the heartland in the midst of the conference schedule. That was to test the Rainbow Wahine and find out where they where. And where they weren't. While there was more of the latter than we might have liked, the experience was definitely instructive.

While the loss to Nebraska was bad, it will be even worse if UH is not able to employ the lessons learned from it.

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