This Duke-UNC basketball matchup is a return to normalcy, however fleeting that may be

So this is what it feels like to feel normal again.

Amid all the disruption in our lives over the past four years, the long, long list of them, the best and most famous rivalry in college basketball — pipe down, Kentuckians — has not been immune. Far from it.

It’s a little crazy that Saturday’s meeting between Duke and North Carolina is the first not only as teams ranked in the top 10, but both ranked at all, for the first time since 2019. Something that hadn’t occurred since 1960, and that as a fleeting moment like a comet crossing the night sky, went and happened in nine straight games — even, somewhat stunningly, the long-awaited and long-dreaded collision in New Orleans.

That’s a discomforting rupture in the fabric of college basketball, because love it or hate it, this rivalry is the one that crosses over, from local to regional to national, long embossed upon the collective consciousness, one of the very few games casual fans pay attention to long before March.

That energy is palpable, under any circumstances.

“You know it, of course,” said Duke coach Jon Scheyer, who like his North Carolina counterpart Hubert Davis has both played and coached in it. “I feel like there’s always a hype and a buzz and an excitement. For me, this is how it should be, with our two programs, what they’ve done through the years. Remember many times, thinking back as a player, assistant coach, second year as a coach, there’s been a lot of these games. This is how it should be.”

Even the most neutral noncombatant can recall specific plays, moments, buckets, blocks, dunks, fouls and injuries from these games in a way that doesn’t happen in the regular season, period. That attention, those indelible memories, are a synthesis of history, proximity and marketing, but most of all, excellence.

The excellence has too often been missing lately, the 2022 Final Four most notably aside. And now it’s back, at a time when normalcy in general has become more the rule and less the exception. Since the last time these teams met with numbers attached to their names, single digits no less for the 49th time, we’ve been through so much. A global pandemic. Inflation running wild. Multiple wars around the world. And the metastasizing ACC glomming onto two teams in California, just to start.

No. 3 North Carolina. No. 7 Duke.

After everything we’ve been through, there’s some comfort in that. Pieces are falling back into place.

Normal service disrupted

It has been a wild four or five years and this rivalry was, and is, no exception, rankings aside. Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski, two giants in the sport who became synonymous with not only their schools but college basketball, rivals and friends and, yes, sort-of soulmates — there was not a person on earth but the other who could understand what it’s like to coach half of this rivalry, and for so many years — both retired.

Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron was sui generis, partly because of the pomp and circumstance and mostly because of the way it ended. And for that season to conjure into existence a meeting at the Final Four, after all the years it seemed imminent but never was, well, it’s like the writers were already on strike. It was almost too much, the stakes almost too high.

Even on the eve of the pandemic, there were those weird blue practice-looking jerseys Nike made both teams wear, and that gave way to the pandemic games in 2021, played in empty buildings. That was North Carolina guard R.J. Davis’ introduction to the rivalry, his first game against Duke.

“Mine was kind of different,” Davis said.” It was the Covid year and no one was in there. It was still on national TV, though.”

That’s not an issue now, the buildings full of rabid fans again, ticket prices through the roof, and both teams again with the imprimatur of the AP poll, an otherwise meaningless exercise that nevertheless is a useful filter for sorting the meaningful games from the dozens played across the country on any given night. The only meaningful distinction, truly, is between 25th and nothing.

And for decades here, it was a given, like the sun rising or night falling, until it wasn’t.

“The energy will remain the same despite if we’re a top 10 or both teams are unranked,” R.J. Davis said. “That game will always be the same.”

Will it though?

Held hostage by the ACC’s fate

That’s the way things have been lately, the constants in our world changing or even evaporating, with basketball and this rivalry no more immune than anything else. And if there’s one thing Saturday’s game should remind us, it’s not to take this for granted.

Rankings aside, there’s no guarantee this rivalry exists in its current state in two years, five years, 10 years. It has endured for 104 years and 261 games in 18 different venues, but these two schools collectively face an opponent they cannot wrangle. The world of college sports is changing too fast for that.

The odds that North Carolina and Duke remain in the same conference get smaller and smaller as time stretches out. There are financial lifelines for UNC, a giant public school with a massive alumni base more akin to the Big Ten and SEC, that don’t exist for smaller private schools like Duke and Wake Forest.

It’s hard to imagine this rivalry diminishing in importance, but it will, if and when it is played only once a year, and without the top spot in the ACC standings on the line the way it so often is. History yokes these schools together; money may very well tear them apart.

There’s no use fretting about that now. The black hole college football has become will exert its inexorable gravitational force on both North Carolina and Duke, and these basketball games will not be a consideration, although they may be collateral damage.

For the moment, though, things are the way it should be. The pandemic is over, even if Covid still lurks, and fans are again sitting cheek to jowl. The economy is robust. Duke is ranked in the top 10. North Carolina is ranked in the top 10.

The most important game of the ACC season to date, the game that reminds everyone who hasn’t been paying attention that March is coming, and that right soon, arrived on schedule: predictably, reliably, soothingly.

Normally.

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