UNC-Duke, Where College Hoops Begins

There is a story behind the Duke and North Carolina rivalry, but like any really good tale, or an Alex Rodriguez interview, facts have just a bit part to play.

It's been added to and embellished piece by piece like an heirloom quilt, its numbers tweaked as needed like the weight of a brag-about bass or the age on your wife's driver's license.

And the true origins, before Larry Brown and Art Heyman first went octagon in 1961, and before Dick Vitale ever spittled and bay-beed his way to prominence crowd-surfing the Crazies, have been lost in the kind of haze the general populace of Duke's west campus quad or Franklin Street will find itself in later tonight.

So let's just go back to the beginning and say that somewhere, around the time God decided to separate light from dark, and bulls decided red simply wasn't their color, Blue Devils and Tar Heels were decreed to just plain not like each other.

Consider it so long ago, that never-gonna-leave Tar Heel senior Tyler Hansbrough was just a sophomore in high school. Assuming we're reading the fossil record correctly.

Yes, the Almighty took the pine for a seventh-day blow, and then sometime later created the North Carolina-Duke rivalry just to let us know college hoops was around.

And ever since, there's been the biggest bit of bitter since they ripped the seams off the ball.

It is, in its way, the alarm between NFL players getting arrested at the Super Bowl and NFL players getting arrested at the NBA All-Star game, that reminds us that college basketball is underway.

And to give the Blue Two their due, it's almost always one heck of a game.

When it comes to rivalries, it's Duke and North Carolina and everybody else can just kick rocks.

There are others, of course. The Red Sox and Yankees play more times than Hal Steinbrenner has mood swings; Simpsons reruns think the AL East rivals are on TV too much.

Ohio State and Michigan have only twice played as the nation's top two ranked teams, in 2006, and that couldn't have turned out to be more pointless if they'd canceled bowl season all together. It certainly would've been less embarrassing. Since 1975, the first year the NCAA Tournament expanded to allow non-conference champions in basketball, Ohio State and Michigan have combined for two national titles in football. And at the moment, their game means little more than there's two more weeks of football left, thanks to Rich Rodriguez proving he can shred legacy as well as he can shred paper.

Since 1975, however, Duke and North Carolina have been to 22 Final Fours and won six national titles; when they're done with their first game, the race to the finish is just beginning.

And does anyone even remember the Redskins and Cowboys have a rivalry? The last time either of those franchises won anything that didn't end with a participation ribbon, they likely celebrated by doing the Macarena and cracking a Zima. All those two teams have taught us is that Cowboy's owner Jerry Jones' head a lot harder than former quarterback Gus Frerotte's, and you could put your kid through college selling January golf getaways in Dallas and D.C.

But it's not just the best rivalry that makes this yearly tilt so special, it's that the game kicks off a five-week march to Madness, ensuring that the end of the college basketball regular season isn't simply one long toilet break between the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament. March Madness itself would probably still be just as great without the presence of 24 players that know Mama Dips' and Bullock's menu backwards and forwards. But it's hard to believe the regular season would be as interesting.

Over the years, other rivalries have hit ebbs and flows, but none has replaced Tar Heels-Blue Devils. There's Purdue-Indiana (at least before Kelvin Sampson took it upon himself to give the wireless industry it's own personal stimulus bill and the rest of the team acted out Jim Bouton's Ball Four), but the Boilermakers have proved that zeros in Indiana don't only apply to tolerance for Bob Knight, they aptly describe the Boilermakers' postseason success since 1932.

There's UCLA and USC, but outside of UCLA's unquestionable greatness, O.J. Mayo handler Rodney Guillory is better known than any USC player. (Sincere apologies, Brian Scalabrine.)

Recently, Kentucky and Florida was appointment television, but if the SEC is even televised this year, it's probably battling the CW in the ratings.

Yet every year, Duke and North Carolina tells you something about the national title picture and gives you more entertainment than anything on television, at least that you don't have to make out between scrambled lines.

If you had to choose between betting this game meaning something or Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski ever letting one gray hair sprout, you'd better bet the parlay.

Tonight's game will mark the 64th time both schools have been ranked, the 41st time they've met in the top 10 and 11th time both are in the top five. At least one has played in 17 of the 24 Final Fours of the 64-team era and both were in the 1991 semifinals. Thirty-three of the 55 ACC titles have gone to one of these two teams.

Heck, the last time these two met and neither were ranked in a national poll, the scorekeeper probably used an abacus. That streak dates back to 1955, or, to put it another way, when Joe Paterno was an unknown assistant, John Wooden couldn't win squat in the NCAA tournament, and the NBA still called traveling.

And if old man Naismith were around these days, you'd have to believe the good doctor would be on StubHub trying to get a spot between the peach baskets to see basketball the way he intended.

It's passionate, it's fast-moving (at least since Smith's four corners, and later Serge Zwikker, moved on) and it's everything college basketball should be.



And, despite backup point guard Andre Buckner and ex-Heel coach Matt Doherty's philosophical disagreements, on, oh let's say, French Impressionism, it's generally Southern-fried courteous. The campuses are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 miles and 15 minutes apart, depending on whether you can get down 15-501 without hitting fewer stoplights than number of youngens Nadya Suleman has.

Duke students don't need directions to Hectors and Carolina students ... well, they probably know Durham well enough to stay on their side of the tracks. Rivals Wayne Ellington and Gerald Henderson went to school together, and the duo's connection even managed to mend fences after Henderson bloodied Hansbrough's nose two years ago in the Smith Center.

They're may not be much fave-fiving, exactly, but they're probably not prank ordering 300 pizzas to the apartments either. (And besides, do you call Satisfactions or Gumby's?)

So, like Punxsatawney Phil marks the arrival of spring or the sound of gloves hitting balls and needles puncturing skin marks the start of baseball season, this game marks the arrival of hoops. Year, after year, after year, for as long as anyone can remember.

And maybe that's why the full story behind the decades of rivalry seems so murky. Maybe, in the end, Carolina-Duke just was the beginning.