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There's a chill in the air and funny noises coming from Down East.

It must be college football season.

The leaves on the trees are getting brittle, and the first few are letting go of the branches. The hurricanes are back, though Miami might not be, the kids are off to school and summer suddenly feels so last week.

Tonight in Capital City, we'll do the nation a favor and turn on the big lights. N.C. State will play host to some tourists from South Carolina and kick off the season that follows summer and precedes basketball.

At 7:03, which is about the time Raleigh rush hour ends, the Wolfpack and the Gamecocks will renew an old acquaintance and about 58,000 people in various shades of red and white and garnet and black will hold their breath while the various colors around the rest of the state will wish they were there.

ECU will open this weekend against Appalachian State, and North Carolina will play host to some more tourists from South Carolina while Duke and Wake and A&T and Winston-Salem State and Guilford and Elon and Greensboro and every school big and small will finally watch a pigskin float into the sky and then exhale.

A Summer ends tonight in Raleigh, and college football season begins.

The Wolfpack will be tested right from the beginning against an SEC team that whooped State 34-0 last year in Columbia. That loss also cost the Pack its freshman quarterback who left the field on a stretcher and the stadium in an ambulance. That the team was able to gather itself and make a bowl run was as impressive as the fact that Russell Wilson came back from the Columbia concussion and became the first freshman ever to be named first-team all-ACC at quarterback.

A win tonight could send the Pack on another bowl run, though the trip will go through Winston-Salem and Tallahassee. The regular season will end right back in Raleigh where State will play North Carolina. We can only hope the conference ignores the complaining of some and makes this a regular occurrence.

College football is threatening to become important again here, not just in Greenville or Boone, and the ACC programs are taking it seriously again, not just in Winston-Salem. For the game to be all it can be, it needs games like tonight in Raleigh, games like ASU-ECU this weekend and games like Carolina-State in late November.

From 7:03 tonight until the bickering begins over bowls and BCS bids, North Carolina as a state will struggle to hang on to what is annually a wild ride. For the ACC to become significant again, it will need the entire state to play along, right to the very end.

The league will continue to ride Virginia Tech and await the return of Florida State, Miami and Clemson to the national scene. That day will come because football is important in Florida and in South Carolina, a lot more than it is here.

There are exceptions in far-flung places. A caravan of Mountaineers will pass through Raleigh on Friday on the way to East Carolina, rekindling memories of people like Clarence Stasavich and Bob Waters and Jerry Tolley and Pat Dye who built small college powerhouses alongside the Big Four schools who eventually lost interest and started nailing rims to the trees on campus.

Yet every year, about this time, we await the return of football and hope it's gotten a little better, a little bigger, a little more important. Not too important, not like Florida but maybe like South Carolina.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it's best to leave it alone and let places like Boone and Greenville and Cullowhee and Elon have their place and time and appreciate games like the Soup Bowl on Saturday and the big game in Winston, not the one being played in something called BB&T Field but the one across town being played inside a paved quarter-mile oval.

Maybe it's best to let the SEC deal with the boosters and the fanatics and the NCAA, let the Big Ten, which is ashamed to call itself the Big 11, live off its history while it dominates the airwaves with investigations and scandals.

Maybe big-time football's just never coming back here. Maybe it was never here to begin with.

You could've convinced a lot of people of that a few years ago. But then Wake Forest played in the Orange Bowl, and the earth moved. Or at least it felt like it. Suddenly, anything seemed possible.

N.C. State will play South Carolina tonight in the first game of college football. Not just here in North Carolina, but in the nation. For a brief moment, all eyes will be on Carter-Finley and the Wolfpack's annual attempt to gather momentum and shake down the thunder and drag us along with it. Miracles happen but usually after a lot of hard work.

A famous coach from South Carolina said a few years back that the way to the top in college football was with great players, a supportive administration and the willingness to commit secondary violations. Of course, they fired that coach last year after he lost to Wake Forest.

College football season begins tonight in North Carolina. And then it will begin everywhere else.

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