If the University of Hawai'i or its football fans haven't yet come to prize the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl, they should.

Like prime local real estate, the value of the Hawai'i Bowl just keeps growing for UH each season. In no small part lately because the number of possible postseason alternatives is dangerously declining.

The Las Vegas Bowl recently announced an enhanced tie-in through 2009 with the Pacific 10 and Mountain West conferences. This spring the NCAA refused to relicense the Silicon Valley Football Classic in San Jose, Calif., and the San Francisco Bowl has committed to the Pac-10 and Atlantic Coast conferences through 2009.

Together they are noteworthy because the already scant bowl options for UH — if the Warriors don't win the Western Athletic Conference or, heaven help them, they were to someday lose the Hawai'i Bowl — are getting thinner.

Indeed, that would leave the San Diego-based Poinsettia Bowl as the only bowl within 3,000 miles that the Warriors might, possibly, just maybe have a shot at if they don't finish atop the WAC. And the Poinsettia Bowl would only look at a WAC team in a pool of at-large candidates.

Just four years ago, in a 9-3 season that concluded with a 72-45 bombardment of previously unbeaten Brigham Young, the Warriors learned the hard way what it was like to sit home in the postseason, a bowl-worthy team with no place to go. It was the third time a UH team had a nine-win season and was left without a bowl in which to play, not a situation you'd want to see repeated.

That's where the Hawai'i Bowl has come in, a Christmas and Christmas Eve savior, allowing UH to go bowling as a third- or fourth-place WAC team, if necessary.

Ideally, of course, UH would earn the automatic bowl slot that comes with winning the conference. But in 27 years of conference membership, UH has shared a piece of the title just twice: 1992 when it was rewarded with a Holiday Bowl berth and 1999 when it played in the O'ahu Bowl.

The problems for the Warriors are three-fold. The number of at-large berths are few even with a record 28 bowls, most of whom have solid conference affiliations. Geography seriously limits the number of fans UH can be expected to bring to a bowl game on the continent and the Warriors' schedule, which annually is the last to finish, allows little lead time.

Bowls like teams that "travel well," which is to say bring hoards of free-spending fans. And about the only destinations where UH could hope to muster any kind of a following would be Las Vegas or the West Coast, destinations that are increasingly putting up "no vacancy" signs of late.

For UH postseason hopes, the Hawai'i Bowl is looming more important all the time.

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