Far, far away from the volleyball madness on the mainland, four teams open the NCAA tournament tonight at the Stan Sheriff Center. Three will end their season here.

The fourth sticks around for next week’s Honolulu Regional, where it could face the country’s two top-ranked teams. How Pac-12 champ USC, Big Ten champ Nebraska and WAC champ Hawaii — 1-2-3 in the last AVCA Coaches Top 25 — ended up in the same regional remains a mystery.

For now that doesn’t matter. Absolutely anything can happen. The 13th-ranked and unseeded Ducks defeated two top-ranked teams this season. They opened the year by ending Penn State’s NCAA-record 94-match home winning streak, then snuck up from two games behind to stun UCLA. They also beat Cal and Stanford, but lost to lowly Utah and Oregon State.

CSU had a similar "out-of-body experience," said coach Tom Hilbert, whose team beat Nebraska, but fell out of the rankings with inexplicable losses to Denver and TCU.

Northern Colorado hasn’t played a team in the latest Top-25 poll and lost three times in the Big Sky, which has won just six NCAA tournament matches ever. The Bears were swept by I-25 neighbor CSU, but beat a Wichita State team that gave Hawaii all it could handle.

Which brings us to the Rainbow Wahine, who have lived on the edge much of the season, finding ways to win every night but one.

"Everybody in the country has some strange losses," UH coach Dave Shoji said. "It’s just hard to be up for 28, 30 games. You can’t bring your best effort that many times.

"We were fortunate to survive some bad nights, at New Mexico State … we could have easily lost that and we could have easily lost to Fresno. We dropped games to most everybody in the WAC. But we managed to survive and win."

That might be what the Wahine do best. Clearly, they are vulnerable. Clearer still, so is everybody else.

"It’s real fragile between winning and losing some nights," said Shoji, who turns 65 on Sunday and should know.

Hawaii hopes to survive some more in its first home subregional since 2003. Tonight’s matchups are intriguing, none more so than Northern Colorado, which moved up to Division I in 2006, against the four-time national champion Wahine.

"Shoji is an amazing coach," said UNC’s Lyndsey Benson, 32. "He’s been coaching here longer than I’ve been alive. That’s not a good matchup from bench to bench. But when you prepare a team for one match, all that goes out the window."