By Dave Reardon

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It won’t be the same without Fresno State.

University of Hawaii football fans can talk all they want about good riddance to a program that is among those bailing out of the Mountain West for what looks like greener pastures in the new Pac-12 Conference.

But many will miss the Warriors’ most consistent rivalry, especially since this one — unlike those with BYU and Boise State — is fairly balanced, and not just mostly a one-way hate affair.

UH has beaten BYU just nine times of the 32 they’ve met. The last time they played, though, in 2019, the Warriors took down the Cougars 38-34 … and those 56-14 and 59-28 back-to-back beatdowns in 1989 and 1990 after 10 losses in a row from 1978 to 1988 will always remain a big part of Rainbows lore.

As for Boise State, UH has won just three times in 19 meetings since the first encounter in 1996. But two of those three victories were pretty significant for Hawaii.

The 34-19 win in 1999 was part of UH’s historic bounceback 9-4 season in June Jones’ first year as coach after the 0-12 of ’98. In 2007 the Warriors’ 39-27 win over the Broncos was UH’s only game against a ranked team in the 12-0 regular season that led to Hawaii’s only appearance in a New Year’s Day bowl game.

But Fresno State has always been around. The Rainbow Warriors have played the Bulldogs more than any other team — 56 times since the first meeting in 1938, and every year since 1992 except for two seasons ago. Fresno State leads the all-time series, but it’s pretty close: 30-25-1 … and the Warriors have won three of the past four.

Two of Timmy Chang’s best games were against Fresno State — one as a player in 2002, and last year as a coach when the Warriors won 21-20 at Fresno with a 14-point fourth-quarter comeback.

The Warriors were 3.5-point underdogs in early lines late Saturday after UH beat Portland State 23-3 and Fresno State clobbered Southern 56-7 to put both teams at 3-1 heading into conference competition. That line shrank to 2.5 points on Monday. But who — other than gamblers — cares about the point spread? It ended up not mattering that Hawaii was a 3-point underdog last year at Fresno.

UH was a 2-point underdog in 2002 when Chang was a sophomore quarterback. He passed for a then-career-high 462 yards and engineered two clutch fourth-quarter drives with scoring passes to Justin Colbert and Britton Komine to lead the Warriors from a 21-9 deficit to their first win ever at Bulldog Stadium. Kelvin Millhouse’s second interception, with Fresno State driving with less than a minute left, sealed what turned out to be a 31-21 victory when John West added an 81-yard TD run with 41 seconds remaining,

This was the infamous screwdriver game, when fans threw a variety of items onto the playing field. Whether a screwdriver that was on the grass after the game came from the stands is still debatable. But the Fresno State administration issued an official apology, anyway, which Jones said wasn’t necessary because, he said, the game management at Bulldog Stadium had actually improved from the Warriors’ previous visit. And no one was hit by anything — except for the Bulldogs by a Pisa Tinoisamoa-led defense and the run-and-shoot offense at its best.

Fresno State was also a big part of that magical 1999 season for Hawaii, as the ’Bows prevailed 31-24 in double-overtime over the ’Dogs. The win gave Hawaii a share of the WAC championship and a berth in the Jeep Oahu Bowl. Oregon State was favored by 17 in that one, but the Warriors delivered a 23-17 Christmas gift to their fans, capping what was then the biggest turnaround in NCAA football history.

Even if they are underdogs at kickoff on Saturday at the Ching Complex, it should just fire up the Warriors even more than they will be for their first Mountain West game of the year, and first this season against one of the schools abandoning the conference.

Plus, when the opponent is Fresno State it always means something.

Hopefully, for the sake of history and tradition, these schools find a way to keep playing each other even when they are no longer in the same conference.

As for this Saturday’s game, heeding some words from 23 years ago might help today’s Warriors, who were flagged 13 times for 138 yards in penalties last week.

“We just needed to be very disciplined and keep the penalties down,” center Lui Fuata said after the 2002 victory at Fresno that elevated the Warriors to 6-2 and helped key their first bowl appearance in three years. “We did, and we came out on top.”