On a clear day you can see a lot more than just the Santa Catalina, Santa Rita and Rincon Mountains from the University of Arizona’s football stadium.

For the Wildcat faithful there is also the vision, dare they whisper, of a potential 4-0 start to the season?

To be sure the first third of a season that opens Saturday against Hawaii at Aloha Stadium has elements well suited to a fast start out of the blocks for the Wildcats on several fronts.

They are 11-point favorites against the Rainbow Warriors and figure to be the Las Vegas oddsmakers pick to win at least three if not all of the first four games (UH, Northern Arizona, Texas Tech and UCLA). It doesn’t hurt that all but the UH contest are in Tucson, Ariz., or that nobody in the country has more open dates (three) sprinkled in its schedule than Arizona.

But, then, the Wildcats have found out the hard way that taking the first step of a new season can be a doozy, too. Last year they were 11-point picks over Brigham Young and took a pratfall with a 28-23 loss to the Cougars from which they never fully recovered in a disappointing 5-7 season.

More was expected in head coach Kevin Sumlin’s inaugural season. Especially after the school fired Rich Rodriguez, who had gone 7-6, and returned Heisman Trophy candidate Khalil Tate at quarterback.

As linebacker Anthony Pandy puts it, it wasn’t fun, “To go home in December and watch everyone else play in bowl games.”

But Sumlin maintains that the team he brings to Aloha Stadium has “different energy, it is just a different team” in 2019.

“I like where we are right now,” Sumlin said at Monday’s press conference.

For one thing, Sumlin says, there is depth on a team that was so shorthanded that some linemen played virtually non-stop and also started two freshmen in the secondary.

This year, “We’ve got guys (second) on the two-deep (chart) that started last year,” Sumlin said. “The talent level has been raised.”

Not to mention that Tate is, by all reports, healthy again and looking more like the playmaker that ran for more than 1,400 yards in 2017 instead of the one that was held to 224 yards in 2018.

Thanks to the UH game in Week Zero — the week prior to the traditional opening week granted by the NCAA since the Wildcats are playing in Hawaii — Arizona is able to strategically stretch its 12-game regular season schedule out over 15 weeks.

“Somebody asked me on (Pac-12) Media Day, ‘you have three (open dates), isn’t that strange?’” Sumlin said. “I’d rather have that than play 10 straight weeks like we did last year.”

That affords the Wildcats an open date coming out of the UH game and another one three weeks later heading into their Pac-12 Conference opener with UCLA.

The final open date comes before the stretch run where they play Pac-12 North Division favorite Oregon, South Division pick Utah and rival Arizona State.

For the Wildcats, a program that hasn’t won more than three games in succession to start the season since 2014, and their second-year head coach of whom much is expected, a 4-0 opening would be huge.

But as the late UH athletic director Paul Durham was fond of saying, “You have to be 1-0 before you can get to being 4-0.”