The University of Hawaii and San Jose State football teams will meet for the 39th time Saturday, the second longest series in UH history.

But it will be a game that wasn’t played that will be honored as part of homecoming at CEFCU Stadium.

What would have been the 40th meeting between them, a scheduled Dec. 13, 1941 contest at Honolulu Stadium, was canceled in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor a week earlier.

As part of the remembrance of the Dec. 7 attack, which will observe its 75th anniversary this year, the Spartans will devote part of Saturday’s program to celebrate players who traded football helmets for military ones and took up arms that day.

The Spartans had been one of the early opponents to play Hawaii in 1936 and coming off the best season in school history (13-0 in 1939), coaches sought a return trip to boost recruiting.

Along with Willamette College of Oregon, which they shared the seven-day passage with on the S.S. Lurline, the Spartans were booked for the season-ending 1941 games, billed as the Shrine Game benefit series, in which both teams would play UH as well as each other.

The Spartans (5-3-3) watched UH beat 8-2 Willamette, 20-6, in front of 24,000 on the afternoon of Dec. 6 and awaited their chance to play the 8-1 Rainbows next.

But talk of the game over breakfast the next morning at the Moana Hotel was interrupted by word of bombs falling around Oahu and smoke rising over Pearl Harbor. “We went outside to see what (was) going on (and) just then a couple of soldiers came out and set up a machine gun right next to the porch on the Moana Hotel facing outward toward the sea…” recalled Jack Galvin in a 2011 interview with Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.

Galvin, who joined the Marines and died in 2012 at age 90, was the last surviving member of that Spartans team, an SJSU spokesman said.

“We all went down to the police station, where they gave us MP (military police) arm bands, 1918 steel helmets, riot guns, and put us out on patrol guarding areas,” recalled quarterback Paul Tognetti in a 1992 oral history interview with Joe Rossi. “My first assignment was Aala Park (and they said), ‘We expect paratroopers in here tonight,’ so I was there with my little riot gun and hoped nothing would come in.”

While most players took advantage of an opportunity to sail back to California on Dec. 19, serving as medical attendants for the wounded on the S.S. President Coolidge with Willamette players, Tognetti said, “some of us got together and said, ‘Hey, let’s stay here,’ and we joined the police force.”

Tognetti made Hawaii his home for more than 60 years and was a UH fan until his death in 2012.

In a letter to the president of San Jose State, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox commended the players, writing, “I wish to express my appreciation for the spirit these fine young men exhibited in the face of grave danger. I believe that such is the true American spirit and I have no fear that such spirit will ever be conquered.”

Meanwhile, the team manager on the trip also was the sports editor for the campus paper, the Spartan Daily. Legend has it that when he finally returned to campus the journalism dean, Dwight Bentel, cornered him to ask about why no stories had been filed.

SJSU spokesman Lawrence Fan said, “The reporter told Bentel, ‘I thought you knew; they canceled the game.’”

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