As the final seconds ticked off the clock inside Lee’s Family Forum, emotion swelled from the Rainbow Warrior bench.

The University of Hawai’i men’s basketball team punched their ticket to March Madness on Saturday night, upsetting top-seeded UC Irvine in the 2026 Credit Union 1 Big West Basketball Championship title game, 71-64, and claiming the conference’s automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament in the process.

“Just wow,” head coach Eran Ganot said after the win. “You’re pretty locked in [to the game], but when that happens, the moment happens – and I tell our guys all the time – the journey is all that floods through your mind.”

This Hawai’i team’s journey started a little over a calendar year ago, coming after the program missed out on the conference tournament for the first time in 13 campaigns as members of the Big West.

It forced the coaching staff to look in the mirror, trying to find what went wrong for a program that had previously come off consecutive 20-win seasons before the 2024-25 debacle.

Facing a second straight offseason of mass roster overhaul, Hawai’i aggressively attacked the portal with plans of bringing in players with a winning DNA. The staff liked the successes of previous higher-major transfers that saw upticks in role and minutes when coming to the islands and pushed to add another that could play as a crown jewel of the new recruiting class.

It’s pretty safe to say that senior Isaac Johnson ended up being exactly what they were looking for.

Johnson, the transfer from Utah State who goes by “Big Fish” in these waters, earned the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player honors after posting 22 points, seven rebounds and three blocks to help clinch the championship over the Anteaters. It was a performance fit for the lone UH player to make all-Big West 1st-team in 2026.

He was one of a couple Rainbow Warriors to be overwhelmed by emotions just a week prior. Seven days after suffering heartbreak in Hawai’i with their chance at a share of the regular season conference crown slipping through the cracks on Senior Night, the big man helped Hawai’i bounce back and end their Big West run overwhelmed by a new group of emotions.

“If not getting a ring that night meant getting a ring tonight, I’ll take it 100 times out of 100,” a smiling Johnson said after leading UH to a conference title for the first time since 2016.

Johnson helped Hawai’i get out of the gates again on Saturday, scoring a pair of tough buckets in the opening seven minutes to keep the No. 2 seeded Rainbow Warriors knotted with the Anteaters in the early going.

Senior forward Harry Rouhliadeff gave Hawai’i its first lead with 12:06 left in the first half, draining the first of his two 3-pointers to put the Rainbow Warriors up, 11-8. He followed it up a few minutes later with a hookshot and Big Fish rained down back-to-back triples to put UH ahead by eight as the clock ticked under the seven-minute mark and sent the pro-Hawai’i crowd into a craze.

Isaiah Kerr, a sneaky portal pickup by the Rainbow Warriors out of Division II’s Chico State, helped maneuver the final few minutes of the first half after Johnson picked up his second foul with 2:22 remaining as the junior sped to the rim for a pair of tough finishes to keep Hawai’i leading by a point heading into halftime.

Hawai’i’s most explosive portal addition helped the No. 2 seed get off the ground after halftime as senior guard Dre Bullock scored seven of the team’s first 11 points in the second half to grab a four-point cushion by the under-16 media timeout.

UC Irvine fought back to tie the game at 44 with 13:06 to play, but Kerr halted the Anteaters’ momentum with consecutive threes to put the Rainbow Warriors back up by four as the clock ticked under 12 minutes left in regulation.

After UCI knotted it again at 50, Johnson flexed his muscles with a pair of inside finishes before Hunter Erickson, the January 10 hero for Hawai’i against the Anteaters, drained his first shot of the night from the top of the arc to give a 57-50 advantage to the Rainbow Warriors with 8:45 remaining.

It was a lead that they would not relinquish.

Rouhliadeff, who provided the game-tying putback in the final seconds of regulation in Hawai’i’s dramatic overtime win over UC Santa Barbara on February 21, showed off his Captain Clutch gene again down the stretch as he finished a layup through contact and drained his second 3-pointer of the game to keep the Rainbow Warriors up six with under six minutes to play.

Johnson pushed the lead to seven with 1:30 left, but a personal 5-0 run by UCI forward Kyle Evans over the next 52 seconds made it a two-point game again with 38 seconds still to go. Rouhliadeff provided a quick cushion, finishing a fast break layup as Johnson dished it ahead after moving through the UCI full court pressure.

Bullock provided the exclamation point for the Rainbow Warriors’ return to March a few seconds later, slamming a two-handed windmill dunk home for the dagger to the delight of the massive Hawai’i contingent in attendance in Henderson.

Rouhliadeff posted his second double-double in as many days for Hawai’i, scoring 15 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in 24 minutes of work. Bullock, an all-Big West 2nd-team selection, added 15 points, seven rebounds and four steals while playing 37 minutes and taking turns guarding UCI all-tournament team standouts Derin Saran and Jurian Dixon.

Dixon scored a team-high 17 points on 6-of-15 shooting while Saran added 13 points on a 4-for-15 showing from the floor in the loss for the top-seeded Anteaters. Kyle Evans, the Big West Defensive Player of the Year, tallied a double-double with 13 points and 10 rebounds going with three rejections in 35 minutes for UC Irvine.

Rouhliadeff and Bullock each earned spots on the Big West all-tournament team alongside Johnson for their postseason performances. They each also pointed to the regular season finale as a much-needed reality check before the tournament, one that propelled the team to back-to-back wins and punched a ticket to March Madness.

“As much as it hurts to say, that [LBSU loss] was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to us,” Rouhliadeff sheepishly said with a smile. “It probably kept us grounded going into this tournament. We knew it was going to be hard; there’s no doubt about that.”

Bullock echoed the sentiment.

“We were kinda feeling ourselves a little bit during that [winning streak], but we learned from it, watched film, grew from it and brought our energy to Vegas and shifted gears quickly,” said Hawai’i’s high-flying senior guard.

That gear shift by UH helped complete a dream turnaround after last year’s nightmare.

After not making the conference tournament in 2025, the Rainbow Warriors won the whole thing in 2026 as a parting gift. Hawai’i will join the Mountain West as a full-time member next season, ending a 14-year run in the Big West with league titles 10 years apart from each other.

On Sunday at noon HT, Hawai’i (23-8) will find out where they’re heading in the opening round of the 2026 NCAA Tournament. It’s just the sixth time in program history that the Rainbow Warriors have qualified for a chance at the national tournament.

Regardless of where their team is sent, there will be a celebration continuing in the islands that’s been a decade in the making.

It’s time to put on your dancing shoes and drop everything else that you’ve got to do, Hawai’i fans.

The Rainbow Warriors are heading back to the Big Dance.