Joining the craze

ALONG TOBACCO ROAD, N.C. -- Early afternoon on a seasonal December day. It is quiet on the main -- and only -- block in ''Krzyzewskiville," the enclave of students taking up residence outside of Duke University's Cameron Indoor Stadium before each men's basketball game to get the best seats. Some residents are tossing a football on the slightly muddy quad turf. Others are sitting in folding chairs, working on laptops, communicating with the rest of the wireless universe.

Game time -- the life force of Krzyzewskiville -- is still four hours away, as coach Mike Krzyzewski's No. 1-ranked team prepares to play the University of Pennsylvania, defending Ivy League champion.

By 5:30, an hour and a half before tipoff, the mood has changed. The cozy 9,314-seat arena has opened its doors to the citizens of Krzyzewskiville. In they stream, faces painted blue, bodies painted with the letters needed to spell D-U-K-E.

Standing -- and that will not change until after the Blue Devils have disposed of the Quakers -- at courtside are the Cameron Crazies. Among that renowned group of fanatics is freshman Bret Aresco, who lives in Westport, Conn., and whose father, Mike, is the senior vice president of CBS Sports.

Aresco, who is majoring in theater and history, talks of the events that happened 3 feet in front of him Sunday night, when guard Sean Dockery threw in a 45-foot prayer as time expired to give Duke a 77-75 victory over Virginia Tech. ''After that shot my arms were tingling," said Aresco. ''I couldn't feel anything."

Once the game begins, Aresco feels the passion that permeates Cameron, venting in the ''Dukie" style. A questionable call by an official prompts Aresco to offer: ''Sir, I believe your associate is mistaken and you might want to have a word with him."

Despite the call, the Blue Devils are well on their way to a 72-59 victory over the Quakers.

Eight miles down Routes 15 and 501, another shrine of college basketball is filling up. The 21,750-seat Dean Smith Center, a.k.a. the Dean Dome, has a different crowd, just as passionate, but less fanatical about getting into the building.

A half-hour before a 9 p.m. tip-off against the University of St. Louis, fans are still filling the Dean Dome, which at night looks like a spaceship that has landed in the middle of the University of North Carolina campus.

As the defending national champion Tar Heels go about their business in their usual efficient manner, surging to a 75-63 win, it is clear they will be contenders again this year. They lost most of their offensive power to the NBA Draft, but the Tar Heels have bolted to a 5-1 start with a team filled with new faces, including 6-foot-9-inch freshman forward Tyler Hansbrough.

Games at the Dean Dome are different from those at Cameron. The crowd is twice the size and in the far reaches twice as far away.

But on the court, the game has the same intensity and passion. It's a mind-set known as Atlantic Coast Conference basketball.

While the geographic boundaries have spread from the core of seven schools in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, to a 12-team league that stretches from Boston to Miami, the pulse remains in the Carolina roots. Duke, North Carolina, and North Carolina State remain the core group, places where college basketball on any given night is akin to a religious experience. The three schools -- which are within 20 miles of each other, have nine national championships. North Carolina has four, Duke three, and North Carolina State two.

It is this devoted cult that Boston College, which opens ACC play tonight at Maryland, has joined.

The ACC may be flexing its muscles as a football conference now, but its heart and soul remains basketball. And if you look deeper, everything still swirls around the North Carolina schools.

Commissioner John Swofford, who used to be athletic director at North Carolina, talks proudly of the ACC being one of the ''most competitive intercollegiate conferences in the nation. "

And it has an impressive history. The ACC, formed in 1953, maintains that it was among the pioneers of conference tournaments and the forerunner of the present NCAA Tournament.

Proof? The 1974 ACC tournament final between Maryland and North Carolina State pitted two of the best teams in the country. At the time, the NCAA field was 24 teams, with only conference champions receiving bids. North Carolina State, which went on to win the national championship, beat Maryland, 103-100.

Maryland, feeling it had nothing left to prove, turned down an NIT bid and ended its season. The NCAA soon expanded its field.

And there was the Ralph Sampson Era at Virginia in the late 1970s and early '80s when he ruled college basketball, collecting the ACC Player of the Year award three times and being a consensus All-American. In 1982, the ACC title game pitted Sampson and Virginia against a North Carolina team led by Michael Jordan. Virginia had handed Carolina one of its two losses that season.

Tar Heels coach Dean Smith used his famous Four Corner offense, which spread the court and ran the clock down. Sampson was largely negated and Carolina won, 47-45.

A few years later, the NCAA introduced the shot clock.

The ACC has bred many characters. Few were more entertaining than former Maryland coach Lefty Driesell, who came to College Park in 1969 and proclaimed that Maryland would become the ''UCLA of the East."

Fifteen years later, Maryland won the ACC tournament. Driesell was so happy he announced to a gathering of media that he wanted to put the ACC trophy on the hood of his car and drive it all around Greensboro, N.C., site of that year's tournament.

Six years later, Driesell was in Maui as the coach of James Madison and was preparing for an early season tournament game against Smith and the Tar Heels. Each coach was asked to introduce his team. Driesell went first and began a monologue about Smith, telling the audience that Smith had won more than 700 career games and been an ''underdog in every damn one of them." He made a few more remarks and returned to his seat.

Smith came to the podium, thanked Driesell for the words and said, ''Now, I want to do what Coach Driesell didn't do: Here's the James Madison University basketball team."

Even on a podium, Smith was hard to beat.

In that tournament, James Madison had a 9-point lead with a minute remaining and Carolina still pulled out an 80-79 victory.

Part of the ACC tradition may have been diminished by new arenas appearing in the league over the last several years. Maryland, Miami, and North Carolina State have new buildings, which need to age with stories and games to be truly appreciated. Virginia is completing a new arena that will open next season.

One building still in use is Clemson's Littlejohn Coliseum. Its capacity is 11,020. Except on Feb. 20, 1980, when ACC champion Duke came to Littlejohn with a team the Tigers felt they could beat. The crowd kept coming and coming. The fire marshals closed their eyes, and when the game began, it was basketball in the round before 13,800.

It was so crowded on press row that former Clemson sports information director Bob Bradley brought out a stepladder, stuck it in a corner, and watched standing on the ladder steps.

Twelve years later, Duke came back to Littlejohn as defending national champions, led by matinee idol Christian Laettner. ''It was like covering a rock 'n' roll band," said longtime Duke observer Bill Brill. ''They were like the Beatles. The game at Clemson, the bus had to go right into the building to avoid the crowds. I've never seen anything like that. Then after the game, on the bus ride to the airport, there must have been 50 cars following the bus, and about 40 of them were filled with teenage girls."

Each March, the ACC tournament convenes -- this year in Greensboro -- and the festivities begin. Boston College football coach Tom O'Brien remembers the ACC tournament from his days as an assistant coach at Virginia.

''It's different than the Big East," said O'Brien. ''The Big East tournament in Madison Square Garden has more of a corporate feel to it. At the ACC tournament, each school has a block of tickets and they rotate positions each year, section by section, so everyone has a chance to get the best seats available. You can go into a building at any ACC tournament and just look where that school's fans are sitting."

O'Brien says that by the second day the Duke/North Carolina factor kicks in, with fans from each school buying tickets from the fans of schools that have been eliminated.

But perhaps it is Smith, the winingest coach in Division 1 with 879 career victories, who puts the ACC mystique into context.

Smith, who had a pair of national championships, 11 Final Fours, 13 ACC titles, and finished third or better in the ACC regular season for 33 successive seasons (17 firsts), still has an office in the building that bears his name, Smith Center.

''It's different now," he said. ''I first came into the league in 1958, and when Frank McGuire hired me, he said, 'We really have five good teams and six wins we should get all the time.' At that time, South Carolina, Clemson, and Virginia were those teams. But the league has gotten more and more balanced."

If Smith has any regrets, one is that the NCAA Tournament has grown so big that winning the regular season doesn't count as much as it once did.

''There was the time, of course, when only the champion went into the tournament and that wasn't always fair," said Smith. ''I thought that once they opened it up, the ACC tournament wouldn't mean as much. I was proven wrong on that."

Now it is Duke and Carolina again, this year's No. 1 team and last year's national champion, now led by one of Smith's numerous protégés in Roy Williams.

Smith laughs when he is tugged down memory lane.

''People enjoy their basketball [down here]," he said. ''They enjoy doing well in the national tournament."

And in the world of the ACC, bigger now than it has ever been, the epicenter of that pleasure is here on Tobacco Road.