The University of Hawai'i football team in the Rose Bowl?

And, yes, the one in Pasadena, Calif.

Your Warriors in the "Grandaddy of them all?"

We are now told that it is, indeed, a possibility from next year, however distant the odds might be.

But even the galactically remote chances of this happening for UH — not to mention Boise State or Utah or some of the other unwashed of college football — have brought about pandemic-like fear and loathing on some levels.

Consider that Arizona, a Pac-10 member for 31 years, has never been to the Rose Bowl. And California hasn't been there in the period since Hawai'i became a state. Big Ten members Indiana (1968) and Minnesota (1962) haven't smelled the roses in ages. The Dark Ages.

The chances of them getting to Pasadena in the traditional way, as winners of either the Pac-10 or Big Ten, aren't good. But, with the coming of the Bowl Championship Series, they have long nursed the hope that, in the years when a Southern California or Ohio State got shipped off to a national championship game played elsewhere, that they might squeeze in with a runner-up finish.

But in a blockbuster announcement at the Big Ten meetings, it was revealed that, beginning in January 2011 (the 2010 postseason) the Rose Bowl would have to take a qualifying team from a non-automatic conference champion in the event a Pac-10 or Big Ten champion was plucked for the BCS national championship game elsewhere.

It is part of the fine print of the new agreement in the ESPN deal that begins next year and a stipulation the Rose Bowl had to agree to if it was to remain in the national title rotation.

So, for example, had the rule been in place when UH went 12-0 in the 2007 regular season and had USC gone to the national title game, the Warriors would have found their way to the Rose Bowl instead of the Sugar Bowl.

Of course, it is precisely because of what transpired in that 41-10 drubbing by Georgia that the whole Rose Bowl scenario gives some BCS folks and their teams acid indigestion.

"Other bowls have been forced to take non-BCS teams before — Hawai'i played in the 2008 Sugar Bowl against Georgia — which was a sore point at the last round of TV negotiations," the Los Angeles Times reported.

"... to think it could be Hawai'i or TCU or Fresno State ... even as a hypothetical, it has a bilious taste to the average Cal fan," Ray Ratto wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

For the Warriors — or somebody else looked down upon by the BCS — wouldn't that be almost half the fun in getting to Pasadena?