This week, a once-unlikely trio of BFFs will meet in Honolulu as part of a farewell tour for one and a welcome-back promotion for a second.

It was through circumstance and necessity that University of Hawaii athletic department officials, Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson and ESPN Events became the best of partners.

Thompson, who is retiring at the end of this year, has proved to be a strong ally and lobbyist for the UH football program the past decade. And ESPN Events, a subsidiary of ESPN, has honored its pledge of allegiance to the Rainbow Warriors with its unwavering sponsorship of the Hawaii Bowl.

The alliance did not seem possible in 1998. At the time, UH was a member of the 16-team Western Athletic Conference, which stretched from Manoa to Ruston, La. During a meeting at the Denver International Airport, eight schools plotted to secede from the WAC to form the Mountain West. Kenneth Mortimer, who was UH’s president at the time, placed calls to the leaderships of the defectors, essentially asking, “Hey, what’s going on?’ Mortimer was ghosted, as the secession was finalized.

In 1999, Thompson became the first — and so far only — MWC commissioner. The same year, June Jones was hired as the UH football team’s head coach.

In 2001, Jones’ third season, the Warriors smacked previously unbeaten BYU in the regular-season finale. But at 9-3, the Warriors did not receive a bowl invitation. That snub led to ESPN Events, the WAC and UH partnering to create the Hawaii Bowl. While the premise was the bowl was a tie-in for the WAC, the wink-wink reality was it would be a landing spot for a winning UH team.

Then in 2011, when the MWC was seeking entries and the WAC was trying to prevent departures, a group of UH officials reached out to Thompson. There was the belief the MWC would be open to considering UH as a football-only member. The Mountain West wanted UH to pay travel subsidies to visiting teams. To sweeten the offer, the Hawaii Bowl would accompany UH’s membership. In a vote that was not initially unanimous, the Mountain West agreed to accept the UH football team.

With Thompson’s help, UH’s interests have been protected. While the subsidies — $150,000 to teams in the Pacific time zone, $175,000 to schools in the Mountain time zone — are a hit to the UH budget, they have not gone up despite inflation and escalating gas prices.

UH does not get a full share of the Mountain West’s revenue from national television deals. But the Warriors get to keep the $3.1 million they receive annually in local TV rights (across multiple sports) from Spectrum.

And the Mountain West has helped arrange postseason spots for the Warriors, even when they finished with 6-7 regular seasons in 2016 and last year. When the 2020 Hawaii Bowl was canceled because of the pandemic, the league arranged for the Warriors to play in the New Mexico Bowl in Frisco, Texas.

And each year at the league’s media days, Thompson assures that UH’s membership is not in jeopardy.

ESPN Events also has remained true to Hawaii. When Aloha Stadium was self-condemned in December 2020, the Hawaii Bowl did not depart the islands — as the Aloha Bowl and Hula Bowl did previously — but relocated to the 9,300-seat Ching Complex on the UH campus. The 2021 Hawaii Bowl was set to be played there until the Warriors had to back out because of an insufficient number of available players.

This week, the Warriors should give thanks to a commissioner who became an advocate and a postseason bowl that did not go away.