news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Now what?

Duke won the ACC championship Sunday in a thrilling 65-61 final over Georgia Tech, taking the conference banner and a No. 1 seed into the NCAAs and leaving Greensboro and the venerable old ACC tournament in its rear-view mirror.

What happens now is anyone's guess, but the pressing questions are immediate and ominous.

Is the ACC champion capable of winning it all? That's a question that will answer itself in the coming weeks. The Blue Devils (29-5) will play the winner of the NCAA play-in game Friday and are one of six ACC teams that received bids after the smoke cleared from a tournament that defined the league's season.

And a bigger question looms. If all this talk of an expanded NCAA tournament is real, was this the last ACC tournament as we know it? If the foreboding signs become real, will we ever pass this way again?

Mike Krzyzewski wondered aloud if we are really thinking of expanding the NCAA tournament in coming years, are we getting ready to doom the conference tournaments?

"I don't see how, if it's expanded too much, you can have them," he said.

In other words, if the NCAA tournament becomes a sprawling monster eating up another week of March with a 96-team format being discussed, the conference tournaments will cease to exist overnight. And let's face it, there's only one conference tournament in the country that anyone will miss.

This year's tournament produced a classic champion, the kind the tournament has always produced. The truth is, there have been very few upset winners of the ACC tournament through the years. Krzyzewski said it was somewhat rare that the regular-season winner also wins the tourney. And that might be true in the past generation. But over time, the team that finished atop the conference standings has won the tournament 28 times.

Duke is a fitting champion, and it became a better team before our eyes. The top seeds in the NCAA South Regional, the Blue Devils will be heavily favored to make a run to the Final Four. Nothing we saw here would suggest anything less. Duke is strong inside and out, with three legitimate game-breakers, an emerging inside presence and the best defense in the country.

The other teams in the ACC? Not so much.

Wake Forest and Clemson both fell on the first day. They appear to be doomed to a quick exit from the NCAA tournament, too. Wake might beat disappointing Texas, but probably not. In any case, Kentucky awaits and the Deacs have a nightmarish history of playing Kentucky in the NCAA tournament. Then again, who don't they have a nightmarish history of playing against in the NCAAs?

Maryland got a fourth seed based on its regular season, not its first-day departure from Greensboro. Georgia Tech stole a 10th seed by reaching the final, possibly even taking Virginia Tech's bid.

In the end, the ACC fed on itself, a tradition going back to the days when the fledgling conference founded at Sedgefield decided to end each season with a conference tournament. The tourney has defined the league and its champions through the years, identifying the best teams and making legends of players and coaches through the years.

Krzyzewski said Sunday if the NCAA decides to go to a sprawling tournament next season, it could mean the end of the ACC tournament as we know it.

"Although I'm not opposed to expansion I'd like to crawl with it, if we're going to do it, to 68 or 72 (bids)," he said.

He said such a plan might keep the integrity of the conference tournaments across the country. At the very least, he said, the ACC tournament should end on Saturday to help teams that must turn around and play as early as Thursday this week.

"We don't protect our teams well enough," Krzyzewski said. "I know that's TV and everything like that. But I'd rather crawl into it. We've got to be careful. The tournaments are exciting around the country, and they're exciting here. Somehow, they have to be kept in the equation. A lot of people feel it's the start of the NCAA tournament."

If that was the case this year, the start of the national tournament began about as we expected. And if the past few days were any indication, we know pretty much what to expect now, too.

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