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GREENSBORO — A league considered Duke's for the taking was turned upside down almost from the beginning Saturday, and all of a sudden the ACC is a wide-open affair.

Mike Krzyzewski appeared packed for a long run before a day trip to Georgia, and now every team in the league can dream of coming to Greensboro in March and stealing it all.

Of all the ACC teams headed into the abyss this week, the first real week of real league play, Duke looked to be the one most likely to see the light again. Not now.

After wandering around the country, surveying the landscape, Duke and the rest of the ACC schools began taking measure of each other this weekend. When we all meet in Greensboro, we'll have a clearer idea of what we suspected before Saturday, that Duke was the best team in the league and dare we say, one of the best in the country.

"Now the journey begins," Krzyzewski said earlier this week.

And now it gets really interesting.

Duke's journey began Saturday with a loss to young Georgia Tech, and nothing could have been more shocking on the first full weekend in the conference. Of all the reasons to assume Duke was back is the relative youth of the rest of the league, and for that matter, the rest of the country. The biggest thing the Blue Devils have going for them this year is timing.

While much of the conference is rebuilding around key freshman, including defending national champion North Carolina, the team we'll watch at Duke this year will be the same one we watched last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.

Duke is the final year of a rebuilding plan that began with the two recruiting classes that brought in the bulk of the Blue Devils' program — Jon Scheyer, Lance Thomas, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith. Duke continues to work players into and around the best corps of upperclassmen in the conference and probably in the nation.

While the other league powers mix and match and try to find combinations and get momentum with new players playing in the bright lights for the first time, Duke was thought to be years ahead.

Clemson coach Oliver Purnell has taken the Tigers to the NCAA tournament two years in a row, the only other school in the league other than Duke and Carolina that can say that. There was some reason to think Clemson would be pretty good this year, too. Last week, Duke beat Clemson by 21.

Purnell described the trip to Durham as wading into "the deep end of the pool."

"It's not the end of the world when you go on the road and lose at Duke," he said.

It might not be the end of the world when Duke goes on the road and loses at Tech, but come on. A league believed to be tipped in Duke's favor with a wild scramble for second is now for the taking.

Wake Forest returns enough talent to win it all and make a long NCAA run. And with next week's game in Durham looming, the Deacs now appear poised to make the first run at the top of the conference. Wins over Gonzaga and Xavier suggested Wake can play big games early in the season. We'll wait to see if the Deacons can change their end-game and finally get the most out of a team that has had, at times, more talent than any program in America.

Carolina will be a force by March. Right now, the Heels are playing with new faces and awaiting the return of Marcus Ginyard, maybe the best defensive player in the league, and Williams Graves, maybe the most cold-blooded shooter in the league. Carolina will be dangerous come March as will Virginia Tech with Malcolm Delaney and Jeff Allen. Beyond that, who knows.

The prevailing wisdom as of about 3:50 p.m. Saturday was that Duke was the best team in league and the fifth-best team in America. The word going around was that someone had to finish second and it might as well be anybody. That's still true, but that could include Duke now.

A season thought to be Duke's for the taking was altered in the first hours of the first full weekend of ACC basketball. The journey Krzyzewski thought his team had set out on turned out to be something different altogether. Turns out, the Duke team we've seen for the past few years isn't any different from the one we'll see this year. It's still capable of losing when we least expect it.

That's apparently the case with every team in the ACC. A rebuilding season in the conference is going to be a rebuilding year from top to bottom. Duke was thought to be playing in a league of its own, but not now. The first weekend of the season will resonate for weeks to come. No one is above losing on the road, and that's going to make this a long, hard journey. The road leads not to Durham but to Greensboro, the deepest end of the ACC.

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