AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. >> Never mind that they haven’t played in 11 years or competed on a regular basis for 15 seasons, the University of Hawaii and Air Force Academy football teams are officially rivals today.

So says the General Laurence S. Kuter Trophy.

The 2-foot-high, 12-pound bronze cup mounted on a wooden stand is the only official football rivalry item UH has, and it goes to the winner of today’s 4:30 p.m. (Hawaii time) nationally televised ESPN2 game.

“The Kuter what?” UH football coach Norm Chow said Thursday.

Exactly.

It is a largely unknown, once-misplaced piece of UH history that, like the rivalry it symbolizes, has just recently been dusted off and resurrected.

Familiarity will, apparently, take a little longer.

When the Air Force Academy joined the Western Athletic Conference in 1980, one season after UH, officials of both schools sought something to represent the Air Force’s ties to the state. UH came up with the idea of a rivalry item, the Pacific Air Command agreed to sponsor it and students at the academy designed it.

First awarded in 1982, it was named after Kuter, who fought for the formation of the Pacific Air Forces Command and was its first head in 1957. Kuter, who died in 1979, is buried in the cemetery on the Air Force Academy grounds.

The trophy went back and forth between the winners until 1997. But when Air Force bolted the WAC following the 1998 season, it was, like the series, largely forgotten.

Though UH won the last meeting between the two, a 2001 nonconference game at Aloha Stadium, the trophy remained in an academy trophy case outside the head football coach’s office to gather dust.

“To tell you the truth, I’ve been here 25 years and I was not aware of it (being there),” said Troy Garnhart, Air Force sports information director.

But when UH joined the Mountain West Conference this year, Warriors sports information director Derek Inouchi came across a Star-Advertiser story about UH’s two former trophy games and began a search for the items with the idea of bringing back the concept.

The Paniolo Trophy, donated by the Wyoming Paniolo Society, a group of Hawaii residents with roots in Wyoming, had begun in 1979. It had similarly fallen into disuse and disappeared after Wyoming left the WAC in 1998.

IN THE INTERIM the closest UH has had to a “trophy” game item was the Golden Screwdriver, the creation of Fresno, Calif., radio station KFIG to commemorate the alleged tossing of a screwdriver at UH head coach June Jones at a 2002 game in Fresno. But though the station brings the trophy to home game tailgates when UH appears in Fresno, neither UH or the Bulldogs have deigned to officially recognize the golden screwdriver.

Officials at UH and Wyoming were unable to locate the Paniolo Trophy, which depicted a bronze lariat-throwing paniolo on horseback.

But after Inouchi sent Garnhart a photo of the Kuter trophy, it was eventually found in the Air Force trophy case and shipped back to UH this summer.

Thursday, as the Warriors went about their walkthrough workout at Falcon Stadium on the Air Force campus, Inouchi carefully took the trophy out of its well-packed shipping carton that had accompanied the UH football gear on the trip over.

Then, it was placed in the UH locker room for safekeeping.

“We’re not going to lose track of it again,” Inouchi vowed.

Not when it is the only “rivalry” UH has.

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com of 529-4820.