news-record.com

DURHAM -- The thermostat was turned up on the Duke-Carolina rivalry Wednesday night, turning Cameron Indoor Speedway into an oil slick and leaving us to wonder if either of the old rivals will allow the other to be the best in the nation.

North Carolina defeated Duke 101-87 on a slick track, winning an eighth straight game and greasing the skids for a run to the Final Four. Between now and then there will be at least one more game against the Blue Devils and possibly three. The best rivalry in all of college turned another page with Carolina defeating Duke for the fourth straight time on the Blue Devils' floor, the first time that has ever happened in the long and heated rivalry.

Mike Krzyzewski narrated the entire game to the officials and the students, and Roy Williams threw off his sport coat. Both forms of expression were probably caused by the heat. "I'm 58-years-old," Williams said. "I probably overreacted." The game was the highest scoring Duke-UNC game since 1995, and Carolina's 101 points were the second-most ever scored in the rivalry. With 6:41 left in the game and Carolina threatening to finally pull away, Krzyzewski called a time out and delivered a blistering lecture to his players, getting in the faces of each one and screaming at them in the din of what was already a crazy house. Carolina was in the midst of a 14-0 run that left Duke wilting and Krzyzewski dripping mad.

"Get together!" he screamed at his team as yet another legion of track workers cleaned up wet spots where collisions and sliding basketball players left sweaty skid marks all over the floor. "Get together! C'mon!"

Exhaustion had set in. Williams spread the floor. Tyler Hansbrough nailed the longest shot of his career, and UNC was suddenly ahead 83-71.

"We played better in the second half," Williams said. The game was played at a ridiculously high level, the intensity growing from the moment the kids ran in leaving a trail of blue paint from the tent village outside to the edge of press row. Players would go flying into the press and the students and the cameramen more than once, and still the coaches demanded more.

Carolina would run its lead to 17 in the waning minutes as Williams stood on the edge of the floor red-faced and yelling at the top of his lungs, asking his players to play hard to the very end.

The pace eventually wore down Duke. The heat eventually melted its spirit. That was long after the Blue Devils left Carolina in their exhaust fumes in a torrid first half that left Carolina looking nothing like the third best team in America and Duke suddenly looking like Duke again.

Whatever that means.

In the second half, Ty Lawson looked like Ty Lawson again, and there was nothing Duke could do about it. Krzyzewski put a stop to it once with the fiery time out with 6:41 to play, but once the Carolina point guard began breaking down the Duke defense, the rest of the Tar Heels began breaking down the rest of the Blue Devils.

The first half suddenly seemed like a mirage. "I was extremely discouraged in the first half," Williams said. "And I told them that at halftime."

Carolina exploded out of the locker room in the second half. Trailing by eight and looking vulnerable in the heat, the Tar Heels tied the score in five minutes. By then, Lawson had turned up the speed of the UNC offense, and he didn't turn it back down.

"He's a pro," Krzyzewski said.

Lawson brought the rest of the team with him. While the first half was played in spurts, Carolina going ahead then Duke running down the Heels and going on a run into halftime, the second was a one-man show.

"I thought our kids played their butts off," Krzyzewski said. "Our guys were ready to play. We did not hit shots for a short period of time there, and they did. They got away from us.

He said UNC looked like the team that was picked to go undefeated by some in preseason, and he said the Heels were simply too much for Duke in the end.

"Carolina played great, and we didn't play poorly," he said. "We played hard, and I thought overall we played well. We're not as good as they are right now. They're better than we were right now."

The 20-4 Blue Devils came a long way since last Wednesday, when they lost 74-47 at Clemson. Both coaches said it's a long way until April with no guarantees that either will get there. On a steamy night in February, it looked for a while like neither would allow the other to get out of Cameron. But the heat weighed heavy in the second half, and only one team, really only one player, could take it.

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