While University of Hawai'i football players, coaches and administrators recently spent several days phoning season-ticket holders, appealing to those who had failed or forgotten to renew for 2006, Alabama had confronted a different problem:

How to tell more than 350 people and businesses who were on a waiting list to shell out $300,000 apiece — plus lease fees — for a stadium sky box that they were not among the lucky 38 owners of new ones under construction?

Welcome to the other-worldly planet of Crimson Tide football, something the Warriors will see up close and personal less than four months hence in Tuscaloosa. "Ours is a pastime and theirs is a culture," John McNamara, UH associate athletic director, likes to say.

UH will be Alabama's season-opening opponent — and a lot more — come Sept. 2 in a game that will mark the grand unveiling of the expanded 77-year-old Bryant-Denny Stadium, one of the citadels of college football, after $54 million and more than a year and a half of construction and upgrading.

What should be — by nearly 16,500 — the largest crowd a UH team has ever played before is expected to be on hand in the 92,138-seat stadium, where the addition of more than 9,000 seats, sky boxes, scoreboards and $2 million sound system is scheduled to be completed in the north end the second week of August.

By then, officials say, the game should officially be a sellout, the only tickets remaining being what UH turns back from its contracted allotment of "less than 7,000."

It is just UH's luck to be the, uh, guest of honor at something of a coming out party for Crimson pride. A program and its fans, no doubt, with a memory. For the 37-29 UH win over Alabama at Aloha Stadium in 2003 was the final game and exclamation point on a 4-9 season, a campaign that marked a 44-year low point for the NCAA-shellacked Tide on several fronts.

Three seasons later, the upgraded stadium, which will return 'Bama back to the forefront of the facilities parade, stands as a symbol of more than a brick and cement turnaround. Indeed, the north end plaza is to celebrate the school's 12 national championships and the four coaches who have won titles, along with 22 Southeastern Conference championships.

Despite the rebuilding job that follows last season's 10-2 finish and No. 8 national ranking, Tide faithful believe the corner has been turned on a rare dark chapter in its storied history. The feeling is that losing seasons, coaching defections, firings and NCAA sanctions are, like leather helmets, a thing of the past.

"Under (athletic director and former assistant football coach Mal) Moore and Coach (Mike) Shula, who he hired, I think we're headed back on the right path to where we need to be," said Thad Turnipseed, a former 'Bama linebacker who is the director of athletic capital projects.

"Despite the hard years and ups and downs we have gone through and all the things that kept us in the news, our fan base has remained strong and loyal to the program," said Tommy Ford, director of the booster organization Tide Pride.

So much so that some in Alabama — including those who tailgate outside the stadium unable to get tickets — will tell you that expansion could have gone to 100,000 and still not been enough.

For its role in the season opener, UH is contracted to receive its largest-ever payday, $650,000. But the appearance is measured in more than money by those who will play the game. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play in such a great stadium and great atmosphere," said UH quarterback Colt Brennan. One that the UH players, at least, have been looking forward to.

"We've been talking about it since spring when one of the players' fathers, who went to Alabama's spring game, came back and told us about the stadium and everything," Brennan said.

"I told my friends and family, who have been loyal to me, 'If there is one game you really want to go to, this is the game. You'll never see anything like it ever again.' "

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