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CHAPEL HILL -- North Carolina celebrated peak football weekend with something not seen in many seasons here -- an important victory. Nineteenth-ranked Carolina defeated No. 22 Georgia Tech 28-7 on a homecoming Saturday, dressed in varsity blue and on a national stage.

One of four games in the country matching ranked teams, this one served to further confuse the ACC standings and the voting electorate as college football heads toward the end of the season with the usual pageantry and controversy that has defined it for 100 years.

The old alumni who drove down the old whitetail highway for this one seemed not to care that their school was dressed in the wrong colors or that the gorgeous fall scenery surrounding Kenan Stadium is now mixed with construction cranes. They came to see a football victory, and a lot of alums have been coming to a lot of games in recent years expecting far less.

Carolina will have a winning season this year, it's first since 2001, and can at least surmise that an ACC title game is possible down the new highway to Tampa Bay.

"Anything's possible for us," quarterback Cameron Sexton said.

The Tar Heels (7-2, 3-2 ACC) are the highest-ranked ACC team and now have three wins over ranked opponents this season. And though it didn't have the luster of the other big games Saturday -- Alabama-LSU, Texas Tech-Oklahoma State and Cal-Southern California -- it was the first day in as long as anyone could remember that Carolina had any national significance at all in football.

So maybe that was why Butch Davis opted for the dark-blue jerseys, why he was still calling for fourth-down touchdown passes late in the game, why he let the kids run the "varsity blue" confusion play with the game out of reach in the final minutes.

Sexton lined up in the shotgun with Carolina up 21-7 at the Tech 32-yard line on a third down with just more than four minutes left. He turned to the sideline and threw his hands into the air feigning frustration. As he walked away from the formation in mock disgust, the ball was snapped behind him to running back Shaun Draughn who ran into what he'd hoped would be a line of blithe Yellow Jackets.

Tech was neither fooled nor amused.

"We've worked on it forever," Sexton said. "We finally got a chance to run it. On film, he saw those guys tended to take a knee when that happened. We tried to catch them doing that."

Sexton then threw a 31-yard touchdown pass to Hakeem Nicks on fourth down to the delight of the crowd and the disgust of Tech and its first-year coach, Paul Johnson.

All week long, and during the bye week before, Carolina had broken down tape of Johnson's teams going back to the Naval Academy, where the option offense he now runs at Tech was born out of necessity. He brought it to the ACC assuming it would blow the minds of youngsters raised on spread offenses and coaches preoccupied with innovation.

Davis' staff is made up of pro assistants and former SEC, Southwest Conference and Big Eight boys raised on wishbones and option offenses, and they held a summit during the open week.

"Collectively, all those guys created a game plan that made sure we covered all the bases," Davis said.

That allowed the defense to play fast and the offense to play loose and allowed Davis to put on a show for the 59,000 fans packed in on a fall afternoon for football on a national stage. Granted, the Heels are on the very edge of that stage and no one is confusing resurgent Carolina with the top teams in the country or even the best teams in Tar Heels history.

But for one day at least, it felt like a football weekend with something at stake.

Davis wanted his players to soak it all in, and if he also wanted to rub it in to his Coastal Division counterpart, he didn't say. He smiled coyly when asked about the varsity-blue jerseys and the fourth-down pass and the confusion play.

"As you grow a football program, I think that's a very important part of the growing process, the ability to enjoy the moment," he said. "I wanted them to celebrate and have a great time today."

Earlier in the week he'd been asked about the impending coaching vacancy at Tennessee, and he talked about the Carolina family and the importance of building for the future.

No one believes Davis has any intention of being anywhere he doesn't want to be, at least not for long. That's true of any coach now that the old days are long gone and the new game no longer resembles the old.

But for one Saturday anyway, anything seemed possible.

With the bells ringing amid the fall colors and the construction cranes, Carolina appeared to be having fun again in the midst of the pomp and pageantry of a college football game that mattered.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com