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GREENSBORO -- About an hour-and-a-half before the tip-off of UNCG's basketball renaissance Friday night, a marching band went stomping through the parking lot. Students cordoned off by traffic cones and barbecue grills cheered, and a line of cars entering the vast lot around Greensboro Coliseum paused.

It was one of the greatest moments in UNCG sports history.

About an hour-and-a-half after the marching band went stomping through the parking lot, UNCG's basketball renaissance became stark reality. Clemson beat the Spartans 89-67 in front of 5,672 fans inside the coliseum in the first home game of the first season in the new venue.

The players said there was a buzz on campus all day, and Mike Dement, the UNCG coach, called it a special day. They gave a nod to the old days, joked about being 0-3 in the ACC then moved on, headlong into a new era.

There wasn't a lot of activity around Fleming Gym on the UNCG campus Friday afternoon, and the university grounds themselves seemed quieter than normal for the start of the weekend. But that was in part because so many people had headed to the coliseum for pregame festivities. This was a Friday unlike any other for an athletics program that was once housed in a log cabin at the corner of Walker and Aycock. Fleming holds 1,831 fans, and not many games through the years attracted that many.

By late in the afternoon Friday, more than 2,200 students had tickets for the game. More than 1,000 people walked up to the coliseum out of curiosity.

"This has been fabulous," said Kim Record, the new athletics director at UNCG. "We all had different expectations about it, but for the folks to come, both the students and the community, I think we accomplished what we wanted to."

There was a time when this night would've seemed impossible. The former Woman's College, founded in 1891, had long fought the urge to make athletics anything more than recreational activities. It sometimes doesn't work that way, though. At UNCG, the sports themselves pushed the school toward Friday night, a slow building of momentum from the log-cabin days to national soccer titles, a move from Division-III to Division-I and eventually to the Southern Conference.

People arrived to a carnival atmosphere outside the Coliseum, a festival of sorts set up in the adjacent Pavilion, cheerleaders and dance teams bouncing around while pep bands played and television cameras rolled.

The decision to move to the Coliseum didn't come without an argument within the university. The question of financial feasibility will remain as UNCG likely plays before smaller crowds inside the cavernous arena in the months and years to come.

"This is a big-time arena," Dement said. "That's the thing we keep talking about. This has already helped us."

The decision to move to the Coliseum has attracted attention to the program, brought in television and recruits and the kind of exposure to draw more. The agreement is a five-year deal. This is no experiment. UNCG has its mark on the building, walls painted in blue and gold, the shield at midcourt of the floor and Southern Conference banners hanging from the rafters of a building known for its long basketball history hosting NCAA tournaments: the 1974 Final Four, 21 ACC men's tournaments and the past 10 ACC women's tournaments.

Where UNCG fits into the basketball scene will be determined in years to come, but for the next five years at least, those other events will be held in UNCG's building.

"This is real," Record said. "People have been talking about it. Faculty members told me this was the first time in 20 years students in class had been talking about going to the basketball game. What we have to do now is build on that."

The game was, in a sense, just part of the show. The arena had lowered its curtains over the empty seats in the upper bowl. A beer garden was set up in one end zone, the school's Blue Crew making noise from the other. Now 0-3, all against ACC schools, the Spartans held off Clemson as long as they could.

The game was tied 15-15 midway through the first half, but Clemson's pressure defense unraveled the young UNCG backcourt sparking a 17-2 run to end the first half. Clemson surged to a 31-point lead later in the game when the outmanned Spartans simply couldn't keep up with the athletic Tigers.

Clemson coach Oliver Purnell echoed what analysts and advisors had promised about UNCG moving to the Coliseum. Schools from the ACC will play here to get ready for the postseason. And schools from around the nation will play here because it's one of the most famous basketball arenas in the country.

"We were presented an opportunity to come here and play," Purnell said. "We're looking at it for the benefit of our program, which was to get in this building."

The night was a success on a lot of levels as UNCG attempts to establish itself in the center of power in the ACC, tries to raise its own level of athletics and to give students and the community something no one would have believed possible less than a generation ago.

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