Perhaps the most important game in this season's BCS horn of plenty will be played Saturday night, with the vast majority of college football fans already warm and cuddly and tucked in.
If you are in the East, you might catch the ending by setting your alarm for 3 a.m.
This is the essence of the University of Hawaii's problem. It has a very good football team -- unbeaten as a matter of fact. But few know about it and even fewer care. Some schools have special-teams problems. Others have depth problems.
Hawaii has a geographical problem.
When it takes its 11-0 record and No. 12 Bowl Championship Series standing against Washington, the game will begin at 6:30 p.m. Honolulu time. That's 8:30 in Los Angeles and 11:30 on the Eastern Seaboard, including New York City's Big Apple, where all major decisions in this sport and others are chewed on.
ESPN2 will carry the game. Few will watch. Bedtime is bedtime.
What a shame.
What is at stake is huge. It is also a nuance.
The BCS needs Hawaii in one of its five major bowl games. It needs it so it can market the memory of last year's Boise State moment.
You remember. Everybody remembers.
Boise State was the little team that could, the unbeatens from the always-ignored Western Athletic Conference, who actually got into overtime in the Fiesta Bowl against traditional football factory Oklahoma and actually ended up beating the Sooners.
Chances are, you remember how.
Ian Johnson took a Statue of Liberty-like handoff and skirted left end for the winning points as all those blue-chip, soon-to-be-NFL-millionaire Sooners defenders tried to retrieve their jockstraps. Then Johnson, the best thing to come out of San Dimas since "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," kept right on running toward the sideline, where he proposed marriage to his girlfriend, cheerleader Chrissy Popadics.
Television was there because television is everywhere. America loved it. Florida won the national title a week later, but people were still buzzing about Ian and Chrissy. And only part of that buzz was their story.
The rest was a national "well done" for the little guy, Boise State. The 98-pound weakling had stomped the guy kicking sand in his face. This whole BCS deal, which was designed by football factories to further enhance the well-being of football factories, has struggled from the start to find politically acceptable ways to keep it a members-only club.
