So This Is What All the Fuss Is About?

I'm sitting here in my too quiet house, the wife and wee one having departed for a week at the grandparents leaving me with my loneliness and the dogs (and cat), and I've decided that it might be worth my time to actually turn on a college basketball game in an effort to see what all the fuss is about.  Normally, I don't pay any attention to basketball until March or so and even then it's minimal, but now that I'm living on Tobacco Road, well, when in Rome I suppose.  Anyway, tonight is the much ballyhooed rivalry game between Duke and Carolina (North, that is) and with nothing better to do I'm giving it a spin.  And it's nice.  Lots of blue. 

But really, a person who doesn't know much about the rivalry probably has no business trying to explain the intensity.  In fact, I wondered earlier this evening what Tar Heel fanatic Will Blythe was thinking and if he had anything resembling a fingernail left.  Well, Mr. Blythe is nervous.  He said so over at Deadspin:

I've got a bad feeling about this one. So does my mother, but then, as the Oswald Spengler of North Carolina basketball, she always has a bad feeling. We could be playing Iona, and my mother would have a bad feeling. If only Donald Rumsfeld shared her capacity for divining disaster

Me, I'm different. I don't usually have a bad feeling and when I do, it's usually a ruse to mislead the gods, to go humbly into the victory store and like a neatly-dressed shoplifter, sneak out with a win stuffed under my parka. Why the gods care that much about placating my bad feeling, I don't know. But sometimes they do. At other times my bad feeling functions as a prophylactic -- an attempt to protect my fragile psyche from suffering the worst (Carolina loss to Duke) by rehearsing that defeat for hours ahead of time. But not this time. This time I've got a real bad feeling.

Comments

[Robin]

Please tell me you at least rooted for North Carolina.

[mai wen]

Too funny, I'm moving to the Raleigh, NC area in May and have been wondering if I'd feel imposed upon to get into college basketball. I'm a huge NFL football fan, but have never gotten into basketball in general. I especially hate the NBA, but watch parts of March Madness if it happens to be on.

So people really are crazy about their college basketball in North Carolina, eh? I guess I'd better start studying up then.

[Jeff]

I was a neutral observer.

[boozeler]

poor Samone only gets mentioned ohly in a parentheses...()

[georgekaplan]

When I moved here, I was ambivalent about the teams/schools, although I enjoyed watching college basketball to start with. After being here a few years, I came to hate Duke. Granted, I now work as a UNC employee, but still. It started the night I saw 4 Dukies in formal wear in the front row of the student section at Cameron (on TV). That's pretty much a metaphor for the whole thing. Going undergrad at a small state school with no grade inflation only amplified things - knowing that I was near JJ Redick's birth there makes me feel dirty.

And I'd like to publicly thank Shavlik Randolph for providing so much ammunition. As long as you don't bring your Duke-ness on me, I'm fine.