Over 52 years and through dozens of hands, it has been passed with care and appreciation from one University of Hawai'i athletic director to another.

From the late Henry "Hank" Vasconcellos, whose vision brought it about, through the stewardship of his successors who beat back NCAA attempts to strip it away, the so-called Hawai'i Exemption has been the closest thing to an heirloom the athletic department has possessed.

It helped pave the way for UH's climb to an all-collegiate schedule and, eventually, Division I status, along the way making it possible to balance budgets and bring Southern California, Notre Dame, Michigan and Alabama here in football and North Carolina and Kansas in basketball. It has since been expanded to baseball, Rainbow Wahine volleyball and other sports, heavensent help for a program 2,500 miles from its nearest Division I competition.

And if UH ends up playing a 12-game schedule in football this year — as remains a possibility — never will the exemption have been as poorly applied if not just plain wasted. Even a 13-game schedule that includes two I-AA opponents, a likelihood, would be a sad reflection on the exemption's intent and legacy.

Yet they are very real possibilities as the UH schedule remains incomplete and the time until the season opener grows shorter.

While athletic director Herman Frazier struggles to find somebody, anybody, to fill out the UH dance card, you can't help but admire the foresight of Vasconcellos. Faced with an 11th-hour cancellation of a visit by San Jose State in 1954 for financial reasons after tickets had already been printed, Vasconcellos vowed never to let it happen again. To make sure it didn't, he sought a device whereby UH could help opponents to come here and would allow everybody to recoup part of their expenses.

The plan that he and Sus Tanaka laid the groundwork for and took to the 1955 NCAA Convention in New York, painstakingly selling to an 86-67 vote, permitted both UH and anybody who traveled here to play an extra game in excess of the then-limit of 10 imposed by the NCAA. As the NCAA has raised the ceiling over the years, the Hawai'i Exemption has kept pace, though not always without a fight.

Should UH end up playing but 12 this year, it would give ammunition to anybody that wanted to take up a campaign to rescind the exemption. Why, they could argue, should the exemption stand when UH doesn't bother to take advantage of it?

The real shame, however, wouldn't come from anything an NCAA panel might undertake but from wasting a precious resource so many have worked so hard to preserve.

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