Saturday was mostly frustrating for Josh Hayashida. After the 32nd hole of his championship match against UH-Manoa teammate Anson Cabello, the reigning Manoa Cup champion found himself 4 down with at most four holes to go. He would need to win all four to force a sudden-death playoff.

The odds of doing so were slim to none. His coach at UH-Manoa, former U.S. Open winner Scott Simpson, admitted he thought the latter. Surely, he was among many shocked at just how wrong they were.

Hayashida, after 38 holes, hoisted the Manoa Cup once more.

“When he three-putted 14, I thought it was over because Anson wasn’t giving him anything,” Simpson said.

“It was like he was trying too hard. And that is his tendency sometimes, is to get too passionate and try too hard.”

Toward the start of the week, Hayashida said the same thing. He understood how his emotions had pushed him off course in the past and how he might keep them in check.

But when he bogeyed the par-4 14th in the second round of 18, old habits seemed to creep up. Hayashida crouched down with his hat off and buried his face in his hands. The pressure was on. Cabello had led for 15 consecutive holes. And Hayashida’s only lead to that point came and went following the sixth hole, several hours earlier.

Once such pent-up exasperation eventually settled, Hayashida’s facial expression appeared to give his emotions a progressively cold, yet controlled, front that intensified as he walked from stroke to stroke across the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th holes.

He somehow looked angry but also focused, and not frazzled.

He didn’t remember enough to describe what happened as a result, only that he won 1 up.

“I blanked out from after 14,” Hayashida said.

One birdie and three pars to end the back nine breathed new life into Hayashida’s repeat hopes, which Cabello furthered with a par followed by three straight bogeys. Any tie across that stretch would’ve made him the first double-digit seed (10) to win the open championship in a decade. But by the second playoff hole, Cabello made the ultimate mistake.

His par-5 drive veered into the bushes. When the ball was found, he took a drop, and with it, watched his chances to tie or win the hole plummet. It closed nearer to zero moments later, as Hayashida’s chip set up an easy would-be birdie.

Cabello subsequently missed an unlikely chip-in from the edge of the green, and an open championship match that tied for the longest in at least 62 years finally halted to a close.

“Anson played so good today and just gave some away at the end,” Simpson said.

Cabello knew better than to count out Hayashida. His 1-up advantage after a first round of 18 in which he drained an uphill birdie putt of about 35-40 feet from the 14th hole, in his own words, did not “mean anything.”

Hayashida was 4 down to last year’s runner-up, Kihei Akina, before he won six straight holes en route to a 2-and-1 win. And Cabello remembered as much.

For several hours, Hayashida and Cabello were opponents. But for multiple years more, they will be teammates. Hayashida is a junior. Cabello is a sophomore. They are part of a UH-Manoa program that established its two highest scoring averages in the past two seasons under Simpson’s direction.

Win or lose, the Manoa Cup, for all intents and purposes, effectively served as a training ground for the state university.

Six of the eight quarterfinalists in the open division were either current or former Rainbow Warriors.

“It was just a great week for the UH players,” Simpson said.