Some of where University of Hawaii athletics finds itself today can be traced to an event that quietly marked its 20th anniversary Saturday.

Although it was little observed on the milestone, the breakup of the old Western Athletic Conference and the aftershocks from the crumbling of UH’s longest-running conference affiliation are still felt.

Today, UH is a football-only member of the Mountain West, and most of its other teams, including men’s basketball and Rainbow Wahine volleyball, compete in the Big West, where they all pay some form of travel subsidies to visiting conference opponents.

Along with Brigham Young, now an independent in football and a West Coast Conference member in basketball, UH has been among the hardest hit by the change, while Utah, which went on to Pac-12 membership, and Texas Christian, a Big 12 member, emerged with the biggest gains.

Membership in the WAC had long been the goal of Gov. John A. Burns, who saw it as a platform to raise the competitive level of UH’s teams and pride in the university. So much so that he spent a decade painstakingly laying the groundwork both in the state and with other governors for the school’s eventual inclusion.

When membership in the then-eight-team WAC came in 1979, it forced UH to grow its athletic program and provided fans with a cast of identifiable opponents with box office cachet.

For 20 years the WAC both met UH’s needs and helped fuel its growth, even as Air Force (1980) and Fresno State (1992) were added to form a strong 10-team conference.

Then, the WAC grew too much, too fast with the ill-advised 1994 decision to plunge into a bloated 16-team, two-division setup with the additions of Nevada-Las Vegas and San Jose State from the Big West; Tulsa, an independent; and Southwest Conference orphans Rice, TCU and Southern Methodist, beginning in 1996.

Attendant to the expansion, UH argued for — and won — relief from paying travel subsidies.

Karl Benson was one of three finalists for the vacant commissioner’s position in 1994. When he interviewed, he said, the presidents were discussing the possibility of a 12-member conference, the minimum NCAA requirement to add a championship game.

When the presidents called to offer Benson the job, he said they told him, ‘We’re going to 16.’ ”

Soon after, Bernie Machen became the president at Utah and got an immediate earful from outspoken basketball coach Rick Majerus about the cumbersome WAC.

Benson recalls, “Bernie asked me, ‘Who the bleep came up with a 16-team league?’ ” Benson said, “I told him, ‘Mr. President, your predecessor and nine other college presidents.’ ”

BYU, however, was so excited by wholesale expansion, it jumped the gun on the official announcement, with its president, Rex Lee, declaring, “BYU is delighted with the prospects of a strengthened and enlarged WAC …”

Then, two years in, BYU wasn’t.

“In a corny analogy, there can be a lot of problems in a marriage, but as long as there is plenty of money you can plaster over a lot of problems,” BYU athletic director Rondo Fehlberg said at the time. “When there are financial problems, they tend to magnify the weaknesses. In this case, that’s kind of what happened.”

Utah, like BYU, didn’t like the way bowl and TV money was divided up and didn’t want to pay for its travel to Hawaii and points east and mourned confusing quadrant scheduling. In a meeting with his BYU counterpart, Merrill Bateman, Machen told CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd, “I said, ‘Merrill, why don’t we blow it up?’ ”

What was to have been a double defection turned into a mass exodus when they were joined in a clandestine meeting at the Denver airport by leaders from Air Force, Colorado State and Wyoming. Machen told Dodd, “I wrote down on a piece of paper who we wanted (in the eventual MWC), and they all said ‘yes.’ ”

Hawaii was not included.

Fourteen years later, following defections by BYU, Utah and TCU and the additions of Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada, UH finally got its invitation.

But, by then, a lot more than the name of the league had changed.