The NCAA is coming to town. No, not for a convention. To investigate. In person.

And you don’t have to be old enough to remember The Cutter Four and Bruce O’Neil and Rick Pitino (yeah, that guy) and Paul Durham and a bunch of banned boosters to realize that this is at best not a good thing and at worst a very bad thing for University of Hawaii basketball.

You can laugh at the NCAA all you want for its rules, silly and otherwise. But it’s like that dorky vice principal when you were in high school; he’s a clown, but a clown who has power over you and can make your life miserable.

Assistant coach Brandyn Akana’s double-secret probation (actually, unpaid suspension) ended with the disappointing conclusion of UH’s season at the Big West tournament last week. The deflating first-round loss was business as usual for a program that has developed a bad habit of losing conference tournament games, but this bizarre scenario of an MIA assistant for the last eight games of 2014 certainly isn’t.

Now that the season’s over, this is worth repeating: Being short a coach for all those games might have cost the Rainbow Warriors a win or two, including the overtime loss to Cal State-Northridge. Any small group of workers forced to toil under stressful conditions minus an employee for a long time is less effective.

So it’s over, but it’s not over.

Some folks close to the program seemed to believe if they shut their eyes really tight, covered their ears and didn’t make any noise, the other part of this — the NCAA part — might just disappear on its own and never materialize. Like that football gambling investigation from three years ago that the NCAA never acknowledged closing.

UH told on itself that time, too, with a press release from upper campus based on an anonymous complaint. Sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire but sometimes there’s just a liar. Maybe we’ll never really know on that one.

Or could it be that’s part of the reason for this visit? An alteration of one document wouldn’t seem to merit the expense of a full-blown investigation. But if UH doesn’t have its stuff together it’s scary to think of the ramifications.

Some guys tell me the athletic director made a big mistake self-reporting on this one, that it wasn’t necessary. I want to believe that Ben Jay has at least a clue of how to deal with the NCAA; he certainly has experience at it, considering he was the No. 2 man at Ohio State as it dealt with football coach Jim Tressel lying to cover up violations.

When the hammer dropped on UH in 1977, the Rainbows were put on probation that included a ban from the postseason and TV for two years. A promising team scattered and UH didn’t have a winning season until it went 14-13 in 1980-81.

I’m not saying this one mistake we know about would cause sanctions of such magnitude. But it was one relatively minor transgression, players appearing on a TV commercial, that spurred the two-year investigation in the ’70s that resulted in discovery of 68 violations of 18 rules.

This is certainly a situation where the University of Hawaii must hope there is no reason for history to repeat itself.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. Read his blog at staradvertiser.com/quickreads.