Apparently, there is no expiration on a chicken-skin experience.

Thirty eight years after winning the NCAA championship, the Hawaii women’s volleyball team will be celebrated with today’s showing of the 1982 title match. As part of the NCAA-sponsored throwback championship series, that iconic match will be shown on the NCAA’s and UH’s Facebook pages beginning at 3 p.m.

“Every day since then, I still get emotional whenever I see anybody win an NCAA title,” said LeeAnn (Pestana) Satele, an outside hitter on the 1982 team.

Chris McLachlin was the color analyst for KGMB’s telecast of the event. (ESPN also televised the match). “That was a real special night, one of the great nights in NCAA history,” McLachlin said.

The tone was set a year earlier when the top-ranked Rainbow Wahine lost to USC in the 1981 Regional Finals.

“They had blocked us off the court,” middle Deitre Collins-Parker said. “I had never seen such a big block that USC had. … We were undefeated and had one of the stronger teams (that) year. Not winning, that was our motivation for the (next) year.”

The Wahine were again atop the rankings when they faced USC for the 1982 championship. The Trojans were towering and powerful. UH coach Dave Shoji described the Wahine as “a mix-and-match group. We had to try to find everybody’s strengths and try to put them on the floor for the best outcome.”

The Wahine ran a 6-2 scheme utilizing two setters. Joyce Ka‘apuni was a six-rotation setter. Satele would replace setter Kris Pulaski in the front row. “That was a little different from what most teams were doing at that time,” Shoji said. “We had to play a certain type of game because we were smaller.”

In this pre-libero era, the middles — Collins-Parker and Lisa Strand-Ma‘a — also had to play in the back row.

“Lisa could do everything,” Shoji said. “She could pass and play defense. Deitre, surprisingly enough, passed a lot of balls and played really good defense, even though she wasn’t known for that. And people served her all the time. She held her own. We brought her out from time to time. But the majority of the times she stayed in and had to play back row.”

In the title match in Stockton, Calif., the Wahine raced to a 10-3 lead, but then were outscored, 13-4, to drop the first game, 16-14. The Trojans then dominated the second game, 15-9.

“It was pretty nerve-racking, especially when we were down 2-0,” Shoji said. “It was really discouraging at that point.”

But Collins-Parker remembered thinking: “We were not going to lose. We were going to give our all. We just played hard and believed in each other all the time. And we believed in Dave. Dave was a special coach. He knew how to get the best, and use what we each did well for us to win. The timing of the people coming off the bench and the difference they made, it was a pretty cool thing.”

The Wahine also solved the riddle of USC’s block while absorbing the Trojans’ best swings to win the next two games.

“They just kept tooling the block and tooling the block,” McLachlin said. “I remember them being a vacuum cleaner in the back row, digging up everything. I think it really frustrated USC’s hitters. They kept chipping away and chipping away. Not until the fifth game did anybody think, ‘whoa, can this really happen?’ SC was so dominant in the beginning.”

The Wahine won the fifth game to earn their first NCAA title. (They won the AIAW national title in 1979.) The outcome spoiled USC’s bid for a three-peat, and was the first of the Wahine’s back-to-back titles.

“My best memory of the team is the team itself,” Satele said. “Just the fight everyone had, no matter what the score was. Everyone kept fighting. No one gave up.”

Collins-Parker, who went on to a coaching career, said: “This is such a special, special memory in my life. Special people. As a coach, trying to explain that never-say-die attitude that you can’t put into words. That group of people know what I mean.”