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GREENSBORO -- Basketball season doesn't dawn like other sports seasons. There's no opening day or even an opening weekend. Basketball creeps up on us like a thief in the night.

You wake up one day and Kyle Hines is gone, and Arizona Reid's on another planet and no one seems to know where all the Bennett Belles have gone. It happens every fall, while we're keeping one eye on the football and the other on Big Four basketball previews.

One day we're reading how the Panthers are spinning their interpretation of bad football and you barely notice the headline that seems to suggest Duke is already playing real basketball games, which indeed happened Monday night.

That's right. Duke is already two games into the schedule, so that makes it official. It's basketball season.

Monday afternoon, in the final hours before Duke played Presbyterian and started the year before most of us realized it was November, a group of coaches from across the area lined up in chairs in front of a crowd at the Greensboro Coliseum and started telling tales from the hardwood. Right in the middle of hot-stove baseball season, right before we get a handle on college football and put an end to the longest NASCAR season in history, a group of basketball coaches sat in front of a crowd of sports fans and talked basketball.

Mike Dement, the UNCG coach, lamented the departure of Hines, the best basketball player UNCG could ever hope to have, and tried to drum up interest for a game against Davidson that won't be played until February. There will be a lot of games before that one, he pointed out, that are of paramount interest to him right now.

High Point's sixth-year coach, Bart Lundy, said he'd recently talked to Reid on the phone, and Reid told him he was in Venus, Italy.

"I think he meant Venice," Lundy said.

This is the time of year we get to know the programs at their most vulnerable time, a season removed from last year and at least two months before the big games start jamming the airwaves. We learn about the A&T women, back for redemption after last year's stunning loss to Coppin. We learn about Guilford and Greensboro and Elon, and we learn that GTCC has a men's team and now a women's team, too, and poor John Williams at Bennett just hopes he has enough players for a team on any given day.

"One day I might have 12 at practice," he said. "The next day I might have five."

He doesn't really know why, and that's one of the things he'll be looking to remedy before the season begins in earnest in the coming days.

That's hardly the situation at the larger schools, the ones that get our attention from the minute the previous season ends until the next one begins.

Dino Gaudio came to Greensboro on Tuesday and proclaimed North Carolina the favorite and everybody else in the league, except one team, to be good enough to play for second in the ACC. He didn't specify which of the 12 teams wouldn't be good enough to play for an NCAA tournament bid, and we're not about to speculate in the second week of November.

Wake Forest will be young again, a trick Skip Prosser somehow achieved every season and passed along to Gaudio, but the Deacons will be deep and fast and big and dangerous, and the only game they're scheduled to play against the top-ranked Tar Heels will be in Joel.

That's one of the vagaries of the conference expansion a few years back to build up ACC football, the gift that keeps giving.

The odd thing about college basketball, of course, is that it begins with no one really looking and continues in the shadow of football until about February when we all wake up and realize UNCG is playing Davidson at the coliseum on the fifth, and Carolina's at Duke on the 11th and GTCC's women are playing hated Spartanburg Methodist on the 19th.

That's when basketball season dawns, long after the bowl games have ended and the NFL has run out of games and racing is getting ready for another endless season. College basketball is our favorite sport here, and it's the only one without a niche, without its own time and space, without its own beginning. Basketball began this week with a game at Duke and with a gathering of coaches in Greensboro who talked a little bit about last year and a little bit about this year and a lot about getting the city and the region to come out and watch. The turnover is constant, and we have to learn the players over again year after year, and by the time we get to know them, they're gone to play in another league or on another continent or another planet.

A lot of time spent getting ready for basketball season is looking back on last year. That's in part because last year is so clear in our minds, and because February is so far in the distance and because no one really knows when it starts to begin with. Basketball season is starting right now, and the rumor is Duke is already 2-0.

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