There's nothing Sacramento wants more than to be like...Omaha, Nebraska. Or, at least, that was the word out of the NCAA and the Sacramento Sports Commission camps last July after the California state capital was awarded the collegiate outdoor track and field championships for three consecutive years in an experiment that could lead to the naming of a permanent host site for the meet.

"In the back of our minds is the Omaha model," acknowledged Mark Bockelman, the NCAA's assistant director of championships, in an interview with the Register Guard (Eugene, Ore.).

Said John McCasey, executive director of the SSC: "This an incredible opportunity. We think we can do for the NCAA track meet what Omaha has done for the College World Series in baseball."

Since 1955, Omaha has hosted what has become a 10-day collegiate hardball extravaganza that sees as many as 223,000 pass through the turnstiles, and puts Nebraska's largest city in datelines and on television nationwide. To followers of college sports, Omaha -- even more than the ping of aluminum bats -- means college baseball.

Sacramento? It means, well, uh -- good question.

Sacramento is home to the NBA's Kings and the WNBA's Monarchs -- but not much else. The next biggest sports draw in the Terminator's new stomping grounds is the Sacramento River Cats, a Triple A minor league baseball team whose opponents include the Albuquerque Isotopes and the Las Vegas 51s. Of the top 25 media markets in the U.S., Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, at no. 19, is the only one with just a single major professional sports franchise. Denver, one slot ahead, is home to franchises in all four major sports leagues. Pittsburgh, no. 21, has teams in three, and New Orleans, way down at 43, is an NBA and NFL city.

No surprise then, that after successfully hosting the 2000 Olympic Trials, the SSC was eager to snap up the 2003 NCAA meet and the 2004 Trials, and more excited yet when word came that the NCAA wanted a three-year host for its track championships.

Sacramento outbid Austin, Columbus and Indianapolis for hosting honors, with Eugene, clinging tenuously to its Track Town USA title, electing not to join the running because of conflicts with the 2005 University of Oregon commencement ceremonies held at Hayward Field.

The NCAA hopes Sacramento -- and Terre Haute, which begins a three- year run as host of the NCAA cross country championships this fall -- will help the sport establish a modicum of continuity. Sacramento hopes the NCAA track meet will boost its image as a sports town and competent host of large-scale events as it strives to work its way higher on the great sports-world ziggurat.

And in fact, the NCAA track championships are just part of the Sacramento Sports Commission's portfolio of coming events which includes the 2007 NCAA Women's Volleyball Championships and eight U.S. Gymnastics Association events over the next 10 years.

"Success breeds success," Cleve Livingston, chairman of the SSC's nonprofit arm, which organized the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Trials, told the Sacramento Business Journal in 2000. "What we really need to do is focus on making events we bring to town as successful as we can."

The consensus among NCAA track coaches is that Sacto, as a host site, is just swell. The organization of the two Trials and the 2003 NCAA meet was nearly flawless, the weather fair to all participants, and the turnout, which topped 10,000 for the final day of the 2003 NCAA meet, excellent. The NCAA and SSC believe those attendance figures will go up, too, as the each successive track championships further grows a track and field following at the dirt-field-turned-track-venue amid a Eucalyptus glade on the Cal-State Sacramento campus.

What more could collegiate track and field ask for?