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Roy Williams has a new book out, and the Dean Dome has a glitzy new light show. The spoils of victory are sometimes hard to figure. Duke has a renewed interest in recruiting, thus college basketball has a renewed interest in Duke. State's heralded freshman class has arrived without some potential baggage, and that's probably a good thing. Wake's hoping it got better in the offseason despite losing two players to the NBA.

And there you have it. Just as the Big Four football season stumbles to its inevitable end, we get basketball. Just in time.

By the time the bowl games have been played and the BCS works out its kinks, by the time NASCAR has wound down and Danica has made her decision, basketball season will have taken its first giant steps toward its logical destination.

Greensboro.

After flitting about for four of the past five years, the men's ACC Tournament will come home in March and basically move in for a while. By then, we'll know which of the local schools will be moving on and which will be looking back to this past offseason wondering where they went wrong.

This was quite an offseason.

Carolina is coming off another national title, a hard-won championship that was followed by one of those mass exoduses that only UNC seems to have these days. The graduation of Tyler Hansbrough was nothing less than the end of an era, one that produced records and titles and a book. Carolina's sequel will have to be built around Marcus Ginyard, eight lettermen from the Hansbrough Era and the usual influx of McDonald's All-Americans.

Some rebuilding year.

If anyone ran down the Heels in the interim, it was likely their neighbors down the road. Duke won 30 games last season and endured another year of unfair criticism because of, well, its neighbor down the road. We've since heard of this elite basketball encampment planned for Durham in the coming years under the auspices of Nike, a kind of training ground for young Blue Devils. But even if Mike Krzyzewski thinks better of it, his program won't be losing any ground to his rival author in Chapel Hill.

If this thing plays out as it appears it will, this could be the beginning of another arms race along 15-501, the kind that saw either Duke or Carolina, or both, go to all but four Final Fours from 1986 through 2005. Duke hasn't been there since 2004, and if that seems like an eternity then somebody's idea of eternity is skewed, but that's just how they tell time around here in March.

Carolina's back because it hasn't gone anywhere. Duke's back because Carolina's back. It's as simple as that. The question is, again, where are State and Wake in relation to their blue brethren?

State's resurgence under Sidney Lowe has been slow and, at times, painful. The point guard from the 1983 national title team has been in perpetual search of a point guard to build his program around. The word out of Raleigh is, well, if they get the point guard thing settled the Pack might be pretty good this season. Of course, we've been hearing that since Chris Corchiani left school, but the good news might be that State didn't get the point guard it wanted. Who knows how the John Wall thing will work out, but it's a pretty safe bet that it wouldn't have worked out at all had the local phenom and his posse landed on State's campus.

The NCAA might have the final say on that saga.

A college campus is a small piece of land, and egos have a hard time fitting in. Wake Forest can only hope the loss of James Johnson and his impressionable sidekick, Jeff Teague, will actually be a good thing for the Deacons and their tie-dyed student body. Wake should be really, really good this season with nine lettermen back from a team that was ranked No. 1 at one point last season. And Wake will not be young this season. Imagine that.

If the Deacons are smart this season, they could make a run at the Heels and the Blue Devils, which would mean a run at national glory, too.

That's the thing about college basketball we sometimes forget and that ACC football fans will never figure out. We know what the best teams look like. We see them every year, and every team in the nation is compared to what we see annually. We have no idea what the best football teams look like.

At this given time, it feels like football has run its course again. At this given time every year, the leaves fall and the nights turn cold and the cheering stops coming from the stadiums and the engines' roar dies down on the asphalt fields and the only noise is the distant sound of a basketball bouncing and shoes squeaking on hardwood floors.

This is the last weekend before time begins again, the last hours before a whistle blows and a horn sounds and a sleeping state of sports fans come to its feet. The longest season in North Carolina is the offseason.

Basketball starts Monday night in Chapel Hill. Then it starts everywhere else.

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