As much as all of us sports fans love college football, November means one big thing in Hawaii - the start of the college basketball season.  From the Stan Sheriff Arena to McCabe Gym and the Blaisdell to the Cannon Activities Center and the Hilo Civic Center, Hawaii's top WAC and PacWest teams are ready to tip it off.

Bob Nash is ready for his first season as head coach at Hawaii while Jeff Law, Darren Vorderbruegge, Ken Wagner, and Matt Mahar have the guys lacing up their high tops for another great hoops season from Honolulu to Laie to Hilo.

In November, though, all eyes first turn to Lahaina for the annual Maui Invitational.  The best college basketball teams in the nation descend on the tiny Valley Isle port for three days of the most awesome basketball anywhere.

For Chaminade - the host of the Maui Invitational - it means one thing:  a chance to re-live the glory of past giant-killings.  For virtually every basketball fan in America, that means remembering one very special game - the day 25 years ago when Chaminade shocked the basketball world by beating powerful Virginia!

It happened 25 basketball seasons ago - December 23, 1982. Nobody in the basketball world - nobody in the entire sports world - could believe it. Tom Mees was on the anchor desk of ESPN SportsCenter and he refused to report the news when he first got it. He wanted verification. So did just about everybody else.

The greatest newspaper headline came naturally - Yes, Virginia, There is a Chaminade.

Even with Appalachian State's shocking win over Michigan to start this college football season, Chaminade's 77-72 win over mighty Ralph Sampson and Virginia is still the greatest upset in college sports history. Arguably, only the USA upset of the Soviets in Olympic hockey and the Buster Douglas shocker over Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson are "bigger" upsets in the overall world of sports.

But for the 3,500 who were there that night at the Blaisdell, that term is relative - they know this couldn't have been any bigger. Chaminade was a tiny NAIA school of about 800 students in St. Louis Heights, while Virginia was considered almost unbeatable.  They were on their way home from Japan after beating Houston (and Hakeem Olajuwon) and Utah in a tournament there.

But the supposed Hawaiian vacation never materialized.  Silverswords head coach Merv Lopes had other ideas. He watched as Sampson, the almost-legendary 7-foot 4-inch giant, got neutralized by the Silverswords' Tony Randolph, Chaminade's 6-foot 7-inch center who played against Ralph in high school (and who knew best how to keep him away from the basket).

Other heroes for Chaminade that day were Tim Dunham and Mark Rodrigues and Richard Haenisch. There was also starting point guard Mark Wells, who tragically died a couple of years ago on Maui, having never really putting his life together after college.

Thus, it's ironic that it's on Maui where Chaminade, now playing at the NCAA Division II level in the PacWest Conference, will begin this 25th anniversary season of the "Giant-Killing" this month. The annual Maui Invitational runs for three days - from Nov. 19-21 - with the Silverswords facing Marquette in the Monday opener. Other teams in the prestigious tournament include Duke, Illinois, LSU, Arizona State, Oklahoma State, and Princeton.

There is no Virginia this year, unlike in the 20th anniversary season five years ago, when Virginia won the "rematch" 86-72. Mahar, the head coach of this year's Chaminade team was an assistant for the program five years ago and remembers the feeling of meeting the players associated with the game for the first time. "I was like ‘Holy Cow!'," he says. "I was just a young kid when it happened, but my Dad was a basketball coach and I learned how important it was."

Mahar says the upset over Virginia and the ensuing popularity of the Maui Invitational has been a real plus for his Silversword recruiting efforts. "It's our biggest recruiting tool," he says.  "We let the kids know that they will get that same opportunity to come in here and be ‘Giant Killers'."

Chaminade has earned its giant-killer reputation.  Over the year, the Silverswords have knocked off other basketball giants - including Louisville, SMU, Providence, Stanford, and most recently, Villanova.

Because of games like Chaminade-Virginia, athletes believe that anything is possible.  Mahar puts it into perspective.

"When you're playing 2-on-2 in your driveway," he says, "you always want to be Chaminade - the underdogs, the little guys who beat the big guys, the giant killers.  Chaminade is synonymous with that."

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