Wouldn't you know that after a season of having to proving itself time and again, the University of Hawai'i football team finally gets its due in the Bowl Championship Series only to see its fans get undersold and underserved in the postseason.

How else to explain the panic and finger-pointing that has left too many Warriors' fans without tickets to the biggest game in the state's athletic history?

While UH wide receiver Jason Rivers & Co. were playing with poise under pressure in the biggest games of their season, some people in charge apparently lost theirs.

That's why we have Sugar Bowl officials scrambling to come up with tickets from somewhere, anywhere, to satisfy the demand from Hawai'i. And why UH fans have reason to be upset with how this whole thing is playing out.

Remarkably, UH athletic director Herman Frazier, who already seems to be on the hook for everything but the Lindbergh kidnapping, isn't the main culprit in this. His administration is hardly blameless, but he doesn't wear the biggest pair of goat horns.

That would belong to the 74-year-old Sugar Bowl which, for reasons that have yet to be explained, couldn't give UH four days to gauge how it ticket sales would go. UH was on the hook for 17,500 tickets and a nervous Sugar Bowl gave the school a now-or-never ultimatum of turning back 4,000 tickets or risking having to eat the unsold ones at $125 a pop.

Never mind that UH could have given it an answer in 48 hours. The Sugar Bowl, with a month before kickoff, still couldn't — or wouldn't — wait. Forget, too, that Georgia, which sold 22,000 tickets right off the bat said, "We could have sold upwards of 30,000," according to a school spokesman.

Of course, the Sugar Bowl, with not much of a track record to go on, was nervous about UH's ability to sell.

"I'd have my head in the sand if I didn't have concerns about that," Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan told the Baton Rouge Advocate five days before the UH-Washington game.

Nor did UH do its fans any favors when it put its allotment on sale without limits. That allowed some purchasers to buy as many as 100 at a time. You can't blame the purchasers but you should wonder why UH wasn't able to better gauge the demand and regulate a sale that won't reach rank and file non-season ticket holders.

The Warriors will have an opportunity to prove themselves again on the field in the Superdome. Unfortunately, too many Hawai'i fans apparently won't be afforded the same chance.

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