Last year, as the Tar Heels rode back to Chapel Hill from their monumental upset of the top-ranked Blue Devils in Cameron Indoor Stadium, UNC's talented freshmen basked in the feeling.
But it was David Noel, a senior and a Durham native who had never won on Duke's home floor in his three previous years, who was the giddiest of all. Noel told the freshmen that they did not even realize what they had just done.
A good rivalry deepens with age, both for the programs and the individual players. A Duke senior taking on the arch-rival Tar Heels for the seventh or eighth time in his career brings a whole new level of emotion to the matchup than a freshman to his first.
With the two teams collectively younger than any year in recent memory, the Duke-North Carolina matchup may take on a different feel this season. When the most storied rivalry in college basketball tips off tonight, the starting lineups will feature a combined one senior, one junior, three sophomores and five freshmen.
And while it is the onus of the few veterans to set the tone for the rivalry's intensity, the rookies will dictate the outcome of the game perhaps more directly than ever before. Several players said freshmen-nine of whom will likely see action tonight-bring a large amount of the emotion with them to campus.
"Everybody on this team has grown up watching this game," UNC senior Wes Miller said. "Whether they grew up in the state of North Carolina, whether they were Duke or Carolina fans, whether they were ACC basketball fans, it doesn't matter. If you play basketball, you watched Duke-North Carolina growing up. And I think that's enough for people to understand how big the rivalry is."
The largest challenge for the younger players may not be bringing enthusiasm to the game but rather knowing how to play through it.
"I really believe you'll see two groups of kids who will be playing their tails off, and they'll be pulling the nails out of the floor," Tar Heel head coach Roy Williams said. "At the same time, my guess is it won't be a very pretty game because it will be two teams trying to compete like crazy."
The rivalry can even have physical effects on younger players. North Carolina sophomore Bobby Frasor remembered the draining effect all the pregame excitement had on him in his first Duke game last year.
"You get so tired so much quicker than usual," Frasor said. "I noticed that first. I thought, 'Wow, I am really tired,' and there are like 18 minutes left on the clock. Just the pace of the game and the intensity on every possession, you'll notice it within the first couple trips up and down the court."
Frasor said he expects early fatigue to be a factor in the game, but he added that it will be balanced between the two young squads. And those players who have gone through the game, even once, will try to impart some wisdom on the rookies.
"[I] just tell [the freshmen] to let it all on the floor, let the emotion roll," Duke sophomore Greg Paulus said. "One thing I learned from last year was in the first couple possessions, I was going so fast, just because I was trying to make so many plays that I ended up having a couple of turnovers. Just settle down, slow yourself down, just do what you've been doing all season."
Controlling emotions could be a key to the game, because for all the preparation and media hoopla, the true indicator of the rivalry's intensity comes between the baselines.
"Once the ball gets tipped, it becomes pretty clear, even if you never played in the game before, how big of a game it is," Miller said.
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