The ACC still earns interest every year

CHARLOTTE — There is this unmistakable buzz that follows the ACC Tournament wherever it goes. You feel it in the street, in the hotel, in the arena. It penetrates all the other noise of the city. It makes you pay attention.

Unlike a hundred other wannabe sporting events, this is still the real deal. To disregard it as a relic of the past is to misunderstand its underlying passion.

Especially when the Atlantic Coast Conference comes back to its roots here in North Carolina.

Say what you will about what expansion has done to this tobacco-stained league, it's still a rite of passage to people in these parts.

You can see it in the faces of grandfathers and fathers and sons as they walk up to the building where basketball is played between ageless foes like North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest and N.C. State, the four schools that laid the original cornerstones of this conference.

You can hear it when pep bands face off across the court, trading fight songs across a hundred feet of hardwood.

You can feel it when blue-clad cheerleaders raise a pointed finger toward the rafters and Tar Heel fans respond in kind. When Wahoo and Wolfpack fans prance proudly to their assigned seats, wiggling in next to Yellow Jackets and Terps who still think their chances are as good as any.

For an event that technically doesn't mean much any more, the Atlantic Coast Conference Basketball Tournament is like money in the bank, it continues to earn interest.

Price of pain

Because tickets to the NCAA Tournament are more numerous and punched earlier than ever before, this and other conference tournaments lack the element of excruciating pain that once inflicted every team except the ultimate winner.

Now it's just a prelude to the postseason, a reminder of how things used to be in this tight-knight conference before people from places like Boston and Miami were asked to attend.

And it most certainly has been scrubbed and sanitized since the old days when arenas were smoke-filled and the patrons soaked their sorrows in homemade, hundred-proof problem solvers.

With today's bigger venues, like the shiny new Bobcat Arena, came political politeness, over-stuffed seats and air-conditioned conditions.

Personally, I miss the old guys in rumpled suits, smoking cigars outside in the cold, doling out precious tickets like food to the hungry and hopeless.

They've been replaced by customer relations people escorting fat cats to luxury boxes that ring the upper concourse.

I guess there is a price to pay for progress.

Heart and soul

But where else can you watch two low-seeded teams like Florida State and Wake Forest play a noon game on Thursday and have 20,000 people paying close attention?

In any other conference on any other day between any other teams, the crowd would be a disinterested blur of souls wandering in and out and wondering why they came so early.

Being a member of this league, however, demands a degree of respect for the game that runs deep.

For those who play, coach and cheer in this conference, it's about more than showing up and going through the motions.

It's about college basketball, the way it used to be and the way it still can be when you give the game what it deserves, your heart and soul.