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A month after their seasons ended on the same weekend, Duke and Carolina are still going at it. The recruiting battles have never been hotter, and the rivals have never been better at it than they are right now.

Another reloading season is coming to an end with the two best college basketball programs in America standing in the middle of Tobacco Road swinging haymakers at each other.

There really is no offseason for Duke and Carolina basketball. The rival schools play from October to April, then battle for the very last available player before the recruitment period ends, landing the best high schoolers in America in an annual talent haul that involves few other schools.

Kentucky, Kansas, and in recent years Ohio State and Florida, are the only schools that can keep up without getting into trouble. No other school from the ACC is in sight by the time April ends each season.

Still another April will end this week with Duke putting the final touches on another remarkable recruiting run. Carolina has already gone out and found the one player it wanted to complete a wildly successful offseason that included keeping what the Heels already had and adding a dynamic piece to an already dynamic roster.

"It's amazing to watch," ESPN analyst Dick Vitale said this week during a visit to Greensboro. "They get the players, don't they?"

While rival ACC schools struggle to keep up, Duke and Carolina rack up. N.C. State lost a key recruit last week, new coach Mark Gottfried admitting he'd watched Joseph Uchebo walk away before we'd ever seen the one-time Oak Ridge Military big man play for the Wolfpack.

"The staff wishes him the very best wherever he wishes to go," Gottfried said in a statement.

The staff wishes it still had him. Gottfried must now hope he keeps what he already has. Wake Forest, just down the road, knows what it already has, an entire roster returning from an 8-24 season and three recruits Jeff Bzdelik prays will be able to contribute right away.

Meanwhile, he and Gottfried had to endure a McDonald's All-American Game with five players who will suit up for either Carolina or Duke this fall, including co-MVP James McAdoo, who will be in Chapel Hill in the coming months. The team that finished atop the regular-season standings added the best player in the country.

"Carolina brings back its front line and adds James McAdoo," Vitale said. "Are you kidding me? I could coach that team."

Carolina also signed five-star swingman P.J. Hairston, one of the best players to come out of Greensboro's Dudley High School.

Duke will bring in a five-man class ranked at or near the top in the country with Austin Rivers, son of Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, a third Plumlee in 6-foot-11 center Marshall, four-star point guard Quinn Cook and four-star swingman Michael Gbinije. And then out of nowhere, Duke landed the player everyone wanted for next season, 6-8 slasher Alex Murphy.

Murphy won't wait a year, though. He'll leave high school a year early and enroll this summer. How good is he? He's a five-star forward who might be able to replace Kyle Singler right away and possible even influence the next great player out there to also come to Duke.

This is what he told ESPN's Adam Finklestein last week about his recruitment to Duke:

"It went really well," Murphy said. "The first hour-and-a-half it was me, my mom, my dad and my little brother sitting in Coach Krzyzewski's office with him, Coach Collins and (Steve Wojciechowski), just sitting there talking. We were sitting there and Coach Krzyzewski said that at Duke they don't say you officially have a scholarship until your test scores and paperwork are in, but that in 2012 Shabazz Muhammad (Las Vegas Bishop Gorman) and I are the guys that he really wants and that I have an offer."

In other words, Duke's signing of Murphy could be the biggest in a long, long time if he's as good as we hear and if he also then brings in the No. 1 high school player in America for next season.

That's assuming Carolina doesn't get him first. Muhammad is 6-6, a lefty who could attack the rim from the opposite side Murphy will attack the rim, an offense unlike anything we've never seen. Or he could play opposite Hairston in the same offense at Carolina, or Kentucky or Ohio State or Kansas or Florida. That's about it, though.

And that's two years away. That's how far ahead Duke and Carolina are looking. That's how far behind N.C. State and Wake and the rest of the ACC are, and they're falling further behind even as another April ends, recruiting season comes to a close and we sit back and wait for another winter.

Basketball season never really ends at Tobacco Road's eight-mile intersection.

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