I hung my head, feeling a bit melancholy, while watching the final seconds of this year's 30-21 NFC victory from the press box at Aloha Stadium. The cramped, rinky-dink press box that shakes when the wind blows.

In 2010 the Pro Bowl, the National Football League's all-star game, will be played somewhere other than Aloha Stadium for the first time in 31 years. The game will be played in Miami's Dolphin Stadium one week before the Super Bowl. "We are looking at alternatives to strengthen the Pro Bowl," said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Alternatives to Hawai'i, is what he means. The week-before-the-Super-Bowl thing is a bad idea. Players from teams in the Super Bowl won't play, and players from teams that just lost their conference championships won't want to. The experiment won't last beyond next season.

Or will it? Has the Pro Bowl left the Islands for good?

I live in California, so I have no right to tell Hawai'i what it should do. But I'm going to anyway.

Hawai'i has to do more to keep the Pro Bowl.

With the move of next year's game, Aloha Stadium and the state of Hawai'i are officially on notice. The NFL has presented an offer to the state to return the Pro Bowl to its proper home in 2011 and 2012. The proposal is a follow-up offer, after the Hawai'i Tourism Authority rejected a previous offer by the league to play the game in Hawai'i in two of the next four years starting in 2011. The HTA board turned the NFL down because it wanted "exact dates that the game would be played in Aloha Stadium."

The HTA must be playing a little hardball by insisting on the next two consecutive Pro Bowls after the Miami game. That's smart. Get the game back here and do your best to keep it. It can't just be that they want "exact dates." There will be plenty of time to tell vendors not to come to the swap meet that week, promise.

This situation should never have been allowed to happen, but it has. There's blame to go around. Blame the NFL for not putting much effort into the Pro Bowl in the first place. The game is scarcely publicized and no effort to attract more attention to the event has been made. They haven't even bothered to change the logo for the last four years.

Hawai'i shares responsibility, however. The aloha has never been lacking. Aloha Stadium, on the other hand ... yikes. Personally, I like a venue that feels like you were transported back to the '70s. The NFL? Not so much. They like buildings that don't feel like they're about to fall over. They also like luxury suites, VIP club levels, restaurants and press boxes bigger than a standard hotel room in Waikiki.

Does all that cost money? Of course. Millions. That's what you sign up for when you play in the big leagues, which Hawai'i started doing when it got the Pro Bowl here in the first place. Valid arguments can certainly be made for all the other things that the government should spend money on. Lots of those same things are supported by the annual influx of football fans to the Islands, however. Visitors spend an estimated $28 million annually coming out for the game. Not to mention support staff from the league, television networks, and us media hacks. We have to eat and sleep somewhere too. Add in the intangible value of exposure to folks on the Mainland, watching on TV while they freeze their tails off back home.

With all due respect to UH and other college sports programs in the Islands, the Pro Bowl is the coolest, most high-profile sporting event in the state. It's like the big banks lining up for a bailout, only the Pro Bowl in Hawai'i isn't too big, it's too cool to fail.

Upgrading Aloha Stadium, a venue basically unchanged since its opening in 1975, won't rob it of the aloha spirit. That spirit doesn't live in the rusted support beams or the upper levels that sway in the breeze. The spirit is in the fans at the game and surrounding events during Pro Bowl week. Aloha only leaves the Pro Bowl if the game itself is allowed to leave.

Get it done, Hawai'i. Save the Pro Bowl!

Beau Lynott is a statistician for television networks during NFL games and a consultant living in San Diego.