If someone who didn’t know Hawaii asked you if people here love football, you’d say yes, right? Not just “yes,” but “oh heck yeah.”

The streets are empty on Super Bowl Sunday. The grocery shelves are empty the night before.

There are team emblems on cars, trucks, houses, surfboards, wheelchairs, iPads and dog collars. Bosses are the ones who start office pools. Elementary school kids can get into deep analyses of offensive strategies. Entire towns celebrate homecoming games or Pop Warner victories. Great high school players are treated with deference all the rest of their lives for plays they made when they were 16 years old. People dress their newborn babies in tiny team-logo onesies. NFL jerseys show up at funerals, on mourners, at grave-site memorials and sometimes on the body of the deceased. It’s birth-to-death here, a lifelong love of the game.

It’s so strange, then, the reaction to UH football coach Nick Rolovich’s abrupt departure. It was a nonreaction, really. There were no gatherings of grief, no public wailing or gnashing of teeth, nor were their celebrations of his exit or exhalations of relief. Nothing like that. The news broke that Rolovich was breaking up with Hawaii to hook up with a program in Washington that was going to pay him a ton of money, and all of the football-loving state just kind of went, “K-den. Bye.”

That was weird, you guys.

Compare that with the comings and goings of UH football coaches in the past. When June Jones first came to town, it was as though the sun rose and set by that man. He was treated as a celebrity. He was a spoken of as almost a savior. When he left, Hawaii fell into a depression, asking heartbroken, insecure questions like, “How could we have been better for that man?” “What could we have done to keep him?” “Will we ever love again?”

When Norm Chow came, there was similar, though not as intense, fawning. It’s Chow Time! Chow Down! Chow FUN! Toward the end, when he got the boot, there was a good deal of cheering, too, truth be told.

In between, there was the regrettable, expensive tenure of Greg McMackin, which brought forth heated discussions about how much the football coach of the state university football team should or shouldn’t be paid. People cared a lot about that. They had heated opinions.

But there was no heat with Rolovich’s departure. Nobody was thrilled to finally be rid of him. Nobody was devastated he was gone. He was liked but not adored. supported but not worshipped, accepted but not revered, a nice-enough prom date but not the hot heartthrob who dominated the room. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe the football coach shouldn’t be the most admired or most loathed person in Hawaii. Maybe Rolovich brought the position back to scale. And maybe when people heard about the $6 million salary at his new job, they just nodded their heads and wished him well, knowing that for that kind of money they’d go, too.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.