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What do you mean, it's only a game?

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published March 8, 2007

I grew up in North Carolina, in the red-clay Piedmont foothills between the Appalachians to the west and the tobacco farms and coastal plains to the east.

It was and is a state of contradictions. It cheerfully sent Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate term after term, while priding itself on New South modernity, including a fine state university system.

As a conservative TV commentator in the 1960s, Helms bashed university "pointy-heads." Instead of a state zoo, he declared famously, the state could just fence the college campus in Chapel Hill.

And yet many of the same tobacco farmers and red-clay laborers who voted for Jesse Helms also worked and saved so that one day their sons and daughters could go to that state university.

In Chapel Hill and Raleigh, in Durham and Winston-Salem, in places all over the state, a network of public and private universities rose in North Carolina that, in turn, made their state better.

As a footnote, I might mention in passing, some of those schools also came to achieve a certain proficiency in the sport of college basketball.

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If the Tournament of Roses parade marched down Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa ...

If Macy's moved its Thanksgiving Day affair here ...

If the New York Yankees switched home cities with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ...

It would not be a greater novelty to me than the annual basketball tournament of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which begins today at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa.

I am glad that Florida State joined the ACC in 1991, and Miami in 2004. I am even glad (but not too glad) that the University of Florida in Gainesville, a member of a different conference, is the reigning national champion. These things have helped establish a basketball beachhead here.

My alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been the national champion four times, most recently in 2005, ranking behind UCLA (11), Kentucky (7) and Indiana (5).

And yet, even the most sky-blue Carolina fan cannot talk about it without acknowledging the achievements of the Other Place.

Duke University, just a few miles away from UNC, in recent years has set the gold standard. Not only has Duke won three national championships since 1991, it has won the ACC championship seven of the past eight years. For a while, Duke beat UNC with a frequency that made me wonder if something fundamentally unjust had shifted in the universe.

But only for a while.

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Each ACC fan knows the other schools in the conference all too well, like cousins you cannot decide how much you like. Any team is capable of beating any other.

It is an odd family gathering, then, that plays out this weekend in Tampa, for some a ritual by which they mark the events of their own lives.

Can a game that isn't football be that important? Let me put it this way. On March 2, 1974, UNC was down by eight points to Duke on its home court with only 17 seconds left. UNC won in overtime in one of the great miracle finishes in history. I was listening on a transistor radio dangling from the handlebar of my bicycle. I was 15 years old. If it is one of the last memories to flutter across my mind on the day that I wrap things up, that will be just fine by me.

[Last modified March 7, 2007, 21:37:07]