The Hawaii soccer team knows the feeling of low expectations. Intimately.

For three straight seasons, the Rainbow Wahine have either been picked last in the Big West Conference, or finished last when they weren’t.

In 2015, the Rainbow Wahine went oh-for-the-Big West. In 2016, they were tabbed ninth (last) and finished a little above, in a three-way tie for sixth, still missing out on the four-team Big West tournament like they always have. The 2017 Wahine figured to be in rebuilding mode, having lost gifted scorer Addie Steiner and four-year mainstays like Storm Kenui and Monk Berger.

But a hot finish to nonconference play — three straight road wins — has UH (5-4) thinking bigger as it opens eight games of BWC play at UC Davis (1-9) at 10:30 a.m. today.

“We’ve been last place in the Big West before, and we didn’t look like this,” seventh-year coach Michele Nagamine said this week. “So I feel we have a lot of perspective riding into conference, and expectations of ourselves. We plan on proving some people wrong.”

In five seasons of Big West play, UH is 2-17-2 on the road. 2014 was its best season, at 1-2-1.

The Big West is as competitive as ever in women’s soccer; it is rated the 11th-strongest of 32 NCAA Division I conferences. Long Beach State (6-3-1), UH’s opponent Sunday, was tabbed to win by the league’s coaches, but Cal State Fullerton, UC Irvine and Cal State Northridge are formidable too.

“It’s hard to not hear or watch their games and see how they’re doing, compare yourselves,” senior defender Dani Crawford said. “But I think trying to focus on us and not them. We know how good our conference is. We know their top players. We know how they play. So it just is going to come down to us showing up as a team we know we can be.”

UH is coming off wins at Idaho State, Arizona State and Grand Canyon. The program hadn’t gone on such a road run since 2004. That was right on the heels of four straight shutout losses, the second-worst scoreless stretch in program history.

“We’ve experienced everything,” Nagamine said. “We’ve won games people didn’t think we should have won. We lost games we shouldn’t have lost. We’ve been able to put together complete performances in our last three games, which tells me my team is peaking at the right time.”

Alexis Mata, in her first season as a full-time starter in goal, leads all keepers with an .804 save percentage. She won the BWC defensive player of the week award the last two weeks UH had games; the team rested up last week.

UH has counted on a two-pronged attack for seven of its nine goals.

Senior forward Sonest Furtado has found her stride and leads UH with four goals and two assists. Junior midfielder Raisa Strom-Okimoto (three goals) leads all Big West players with 37 shots, or 4.1 per game.

“We know what we’re capable of, we know how to control the game,” said Strom-Okimoto, the team’s returning All-BWC first-teamer. “We have all the tools, it’s just how we use that. Putting ourselves in situations where we did lose, we were down, and were on a losing streak, and be able to come back from that is what really helps us mentally and be able to understand … how capable we are of doing great things.”