For one more night, Riley Wallace got to be the crusty coach he has always wanted us to believe that he is.

One last time on the home floor, the University of Hawai'i men's basketball coach was able to lecture officials, animatedly jab his finger at players and then snap at reporters' questions without fear of the looming emotions getting in the way.

To be sure he got into it as much as a coach whose team led by 20 points — or more — most of the way could in what became an 81-64 blowout of Idaho.

When Wallace was asked in a post-game interview about what shaped up as his penultimate night on the home hardwood, he quickly snapped a defiant: "Is it?"

Yes, it is and Wallace knew it better than anybody else in the gathering of 4,090. Each time he walks through the tunnel now you see it in his eyes and stride. But he has been steeling himself against acknowledging it until tomorrow's home finale against Boise State. To be sure he is focused on winning because he wants to go out a winner so bad it drives him with all the energy and purpose a 65-year-old can muster.

Wallace wants that focus to carry over to his players, who sense the import of the coming night and may have a postseason riding on it.

There is also an element of a last-gasp defensive mechanism to be sure because come the regular season sign-off tomorrow, the jig will be up. Riley will be revealed in a way few not of the Rainbow Warrior family have seen him. Once Senior Night rolls around even the hardbitten coach knows the pent-up emotions of a quarter-century spent here — the last 20 years as head coach — are likely to betray him. That if there is a dry eye among the faithful at the Stan Sheriff Center at night's end it surely won't be his.

"I have a problem," Wallace acknowledged. "I cry at all sad movies and I cry at funerals whether I know them (the deceased) or not because other people are doing that." One reason, perhaps, his apprenticeship in a small town Illinois funeral home never panned out. Just as you can't have funeral directors breaking down in front of the people they are charged with comforting, neither can you have a coach going weepy in the stretch run. Especially one so self-cast and celebrated as hard-boiled.

"I have an image that I'm a bad ass and I don't really want people to see my real image ... of being a softee," Wallace says. "And, that's what I'm going to have to live with because it will be hard when you see yourself with the players and you guys to walk out of here without some emotion. How do you (not) do it? You don't."

So, for one more time, the last time, UH's winningest men's basketball coach was able to leave the floor with his tear ducts dry and his image intact.

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