March has a different feel for the Wahine this season

This is the point in the college basketball season when recent history has painfully taught the University of Hawaii Rainbow Wahine to temper hopes and not to expect too much.

For March has been their cruelest of months, the place where even modest hopes have been dashed and seasons tend to end suddenly and with thudding disappointment. The juncture where March Madness abruptly turns to sadness.

Yet, as Saturday night’s 69-60 victory over Cal State Northridge helped underline, this is is what makes this March, though barely begun, so potentially different. So enticing.

Perhaps not since 2003 have the Rainbow Wahine had so much to look forward to as the schedule winds down with two more home games and heads toward postseason and the March 13-16 Big West Tournament in Anaheim, Calif.

For the longest of times — and the Rainbow Wahine haven’t won so much as a conference tournament quarterfinal game in nine seasons — has there been so much reason for optimism. They’d won just one game in March — regular or postseason — in three previous seasons until Saturday night.

Or as fourth-year junior guard Shawna-Lei Kuehu said she put it to teammates, "Guys, we’re winning. You know we could actually go into the (Big West Conference) tournament with a bye for the first time. Seriously, we could go to the finals if we play well," Kuehu said.

Indeed, here are the Rainbow Wahine at 15-12 and 11-5 in conference and, having won four of their last five games, holding tight to the likelihood of a third-place, regular-season finish and a chance at something even better.

It is, Kuehu acknowledged, "just an amazing progression to see."

And a season-high turnout of 1,872 on Whiteout Night at the Stan Sheriff Center did.

Never mind that the latest victory in that progression was a ragged one, tighter to the finish than it needed to be. It is precisely the kind of game the Rainbow Wahine would have lost in recent years. The kind that would have started them spiraling downward toward another disappointing finish.

Or, as head coach Laura Beeman put it, "Earlier this year I think it (a victory) would not have happened either."

When UH lost the services of forwards Kamilah Martin and Ashleigh Karaitiana, its two leading scorers this season, in the final three minutes Saturday night, fouling out of the game, it did not spell defeat or even despair.

When the turnovers mounted toward a season-high 25, neither the emotion nor the game got away from them.

It tested their resilience and their depth, to be sure, but did not find them lacking.

"Right now, knock on wood, we are healthy and players are picking (the team) up," Beeman said. "We need them to pick it up and keep it up down the stretch."

But, Beeman added, "I feel real good about the direction we are going."

And it has been quite a while since a Rainbow Wahine coach could say that at this time of the year with any conviction.

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