For a University of Hawaii football team desperately in need of a bounce-back season, the 2018 schedule has “opportunity” scrawled all over it.

When the Mountain West Conference announced its league schedule Thursday, it dove-tailed nicely with the non-conference portion to give the Rainbow Warriors what lines up to be their best shot, scheduling-wise, at a winning season through at least the next three years.

The resulting roll call of opponents won’t swamp the box office with season-ticket customers, but it might afford head coach Nick Rolovich a few more restful nights of sleep after the horrors of the 3-9 season just past.

Maybe all those boxes of Big Island Candies athletic director David Matlin likes to spread around the conference did the trick.

There are no guarantees of what would be the ’Bows’ first winning season in eight years, of course, but with a little luck the possibilities are there to be had.

Let us count some of the ways.

For the first time in 17 seasons UH does not play an opponent from a Power Five conference. That hasn’t been the case since Nick Rolovich was last seen playing quarterback at the school (2001).

To put that in perspective, consider that UH played three Power Five conference teams per season in three of the past four years and two or more in eight of the last 10 campaigns. Remember the tag-teaming of Ohio State and Wisconsin (2015) or Cal, Michigan and Arizona (2016)?

This year UH is one of only two schools in the 12-member MWC (Air Force is the other) without at least one Power Five foe on the regular-season schedule.

That’s no small respite considering that in 2019 UH’s schedule includes Washington, Arizona and Oregon State, while the 2020 slate serves up Arizona and Oregon State — both on the road.

Nor, in this last year of the current conference rotation, does UH face the MWC’s most accomplished program, Boise State. That is subject to change in 2019, when the next two-year rotation begins and the Broncos and their Ty-D-Bol turf likely return to the schedule.

While UH opens its season with a conference road game (in this case Aug. 25 at Colorado State) for the first time since 1991, it is vastly preferred to the alternative, which would have been a gauntlet of 13 games in 13 weeks as was the case in the 3-10 season of 2015.

By persuading CSU to move the contest into the Week Zero slot and take advantage of the early start that comes with the three-year-old modified Hawaii Exception, UH gains an open date it would not have had otherwise.

An open week somewhere prior to the Nov. 10 date UH ended up with would have been ideal, but what the Rainbow Warriors got still provides a welcome break going into the final two conference games.

Meanwhile, only one UH conference opponent, San Jose State, has an open date immediately preceding a game with UH. Sometimes UH has faced as many as three in a season.

UH also eluded the dreaded back-to-back placement of away games, which had been a staple of its schedules for 11 of the past 12 seasons.

The schedule, as it currently stands, opens the door to some promising possibilities for the ’Bows. Now, it is up to UH to capitalize on them.