SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nine years ago, at a resort not far from here, the Western Athletic Conference came to acrimoniously divide up the blankets in what would become the biggest and messiest intercollegiate conference divorce in Division I-A athletics.

From a then-16-member WAC, eventually three schools — Hawai'i, Fresno State and San Jose State — would be left stranded under a suddenly lonely conference umbrella, undercut by former colleagues and left to face the most dire of forecasts and agonizingly uncertain of futures.

Today the conference is back in these parts for its WAC Football Preview, and with two players who finished in the top handful of Heisman Trophy contestants — UH quarterback Colt Brennan and Boise State running back Ian Johnson — and two teams that finished in the Top 25 — Boise State and UH — it is a celebration of not only its survival but all that it has become.

It is an opportunity for the WAC — the little conference that could — to pound its chest and take a few well-deserved bows.

"We finished the last football and basketball regular seasons with teams ranked in the top 10 of each poll and I don't know another (non-Bowl Championship Series) conference that can say that," commissioner Karl Benson told writers yesterday. "The WAC is still the second most-recognized conference in the West — and that says a lot."

Indeed, it says that the WAC did not fade away after the defections of Air Force, Brigham Young, Utah and the rest. It did not descend into the much-anticipated irrelevance after the parting by Rice, Southern Methodist and others. All of which had been predicted if not fully expected.

Closing in on a decade after the first tremors in what would become wholesale change, the WAC has rebuilt and redefined itself. And it has gained a measure of pride and respect for doing so. No more the conference that got dumped, it won out in head-to-head football games with the Mountain West Conference, the league composed of nine defectors.

"It is very different now than when the conference split up," noted Kenneth Mortimer, who was UH's president in 1998 and now speaks as a private observer. "Karl has done a distinguished job in holding things together as national and regional alignments sorted themselves out."

Next year, in his 14th year on the job, Benson will become the longest-serving WAC commissioner, an affirmation of his leadership in painstakingly rallying and rebuilding the WAC through difficult times. Benson helped guide the additions of Nevada (2000) and Boise State (2001) to what he calls the "pillar" members of UH and Fresno State.

Though Benson doesn't dwell on it publicly, he is every bit the scrapper his enduring league is. Maybe that's why they've come this far. For it was Benson, recovering from retinal surgery, who was dumped like the remnants of his league nine years ago and has embraced the task of rallying the WAC.

Together they — and the members who have signed on since — have taken this conference to a level hardly imagined nine years ago amid the most cruel of circumstances. To be sure the WAC has a long way to go and faces no lack of steep challenges getting there but sometimes it is both useful and satisfying to look back.

This week, as the history should remind us, is one of those times.

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