Time was when the University of Hawai'i football team couldn't get on the same field with Notre Dame, no matter what the record or how impassioned the plea.

Nine years ago the Fighting Irish canceled their contract with the Warriors.

Twenty-four years ago UH wasn't deemed to have the name or standing to play opposite the Fighting Irish in a bowl here.

All of which means it behooves the Warriors to not only appreciate the opportunity before them today, but make the most of what they are blessed with in the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl.

And it is a gift to be sure for a team that is 7-6 and started its season with a 1-3 thud. One we could be talking about for years to come, if the Warriors make use of the situation.

UH is appearing in its fifth Hawai'i Bowl and seventh postseason at Aloha Stadium and it could play in several times that many and not have the pre-Christmas present it unwraps today. Hawai'i is only the second of what we now consider non-Bowl Championship Series schools to get a postseason date with Notre Dame. The Warriors are the only team of any pedigree with six losses to get a bowl meeting with the Fighting Irish.

And they get it here in front of the home crowd and a national cable audience with a buzz that transcends their accumulated records.

Never mind that the Fighting Irish, at 6-6, are but a shadow of their legendary selves and haven't awakened any echoes in years. They are descendants of the temple of football in South Bend, which is all anybody will know or care looking at the record of this game 10, 20 years from now.

When the late father of Hawai'i bowl games, Mackay Yanagisawa, first took a chance on putting a postseason game here in the early 1980s, he dreamed of an appearance by the Irish.

It was Yanagisawa's fervent wish to someday bring both the New York Yankees and Notre Dame here. In the days before there was even the term "branding" they were the two biggest brand names in sports. "They," Yanagisawa used to say, "are the teams that everybody knows. Even people who don't follow sports."

Yanagisawa got his Notre Dame appearance in the 1984 Aloha Bowl, but the match most local fans wanted, UH against the Fighting Irish, didn't happen. The opening that would have given UH its NCAA bowl breakthrough went, instead, to Southern Methodist, just ahead of the NCAA posse. UH, despite some heavy campaigning by then-athletic director Stan Sheriff, and head coach Dick Tomey, not to mention considerable letter writing by fans, was deemed not quite ready for prime time.

It would be five more years before UH got its first NCAA bowl game and seven years before it saw Notre Dame on an opposite sideline. Then, after two Fighting Irish regular-season visits, and two narrow escapes, Notre Dame asked out of future contracts.

The 2008 Warriors are custodians of an opportunity denied their predecessors, and one unlikely to fall into the laps of their successors for quite some time.

For all those reasons and more, this is too good for the Warriors to waste.