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The incident at the rim last season clearly was the result of Gerald Henderson's forearm slamming into Tyler Hansbrough's nose, or vice versa. The perspective differing on the angle of repose.

We all sat back and watched it live, then saw it replayed countless times last March -- March 4 to be exact, the last time this rivalry collided at the rim inside the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill. The argument raged for hours before spilling into a national spat, as this rivalry has become in recent years.

No longer a game played on an eight-mile court connecting the two schools, the Duke-Carolina series has become a national game.

That's not a good thing, of course, because the locals know this series is destined to collide again and again over time, eventually spilling into an NCAA championship game that no one here really wants to consider. The blood that ran after the incident last March became a big story for all the wrong reasons.

"It stays in people's minds because we live in the same neighborhood," said Mike Krzyzewski, Duke's coach. "That's why it got the attention it did. We've had a lot of hard fouls in our league, and people forget about them. But they won't forget about that because of the rivalry."

Duke will play North Carolina today in Chapel Hill, a 9 p.m. game that will go live on worldwide cable with Dick Vitale making a triumphant return to the microphone after throat surgery and the entire college basketball neighborhood tuned in for the first big game of the season. The theme of the game? You already know it.

Henderson left his feet last March 4 with bad intent. He was planning on blocking the basketball into the floor of the Smith Center if not the rafters. He timed his leap so he could load his right arm and deliver an angry rejection that would help alleviate the pain of Duke getting whipped by its rival in the final game of the regular season.

Hansbrough left his feet at about the same time with equally bad intentions. He was planning to jam the ball, Henderson and all. He timed his jump so he could drop a two-handed exclamation point on the game, the season and the series.

The ball was knocked loose on the way up, dislodged from below by a Duke walk-on. As the two players flew into each other, Hansbrough tried to regain possession of the ball just as Henderson's forearm arrived at his nose. The collision was ugly, Henderson trying to avoid slamming bodies by turning slightly at the last second but not stopping the tomahawk right arm. It slammed into Hansbrough's face, and the blood poured forth.

The discussion started in the media room afterward and continued on the airwaves that night and into the following weeks, where the play was shown over and over and the coaches were asked again and again to explain their positions.

Duke didn't win another game, losing in the first round of the ACC tournament with Henderson suspended, and in the first round of the NCAA tournament when a rattled team lost for the eighth time in less than two months. Carolina, playing with a masked Hansbrough, lumbered into the second weekend of the national tournament before falling to Georgetown. Some blamed Henderson for that loss, and those people will be waiting for him tonight in the Smith Center.

The rim in front of the student section again will be the focus of the attention as a national audience watches and hopes the game lives up to the hype. The hype, of course, was one of the reasons for what happened last year. Roy Williams said those outside the rivalry can never understand what really fuels it.

"The second thought I had was that I hated for what I thought had been a good, hard-played game to end like that," the UNC coach said, "because that's what people were going to talk about. When I remembered the game I wanted to remember how both teams competed, how both teams played exceptionally hard. That was what I wanted to remember."

He wasn't clear on what his first thought was.

Here in North Carolina, we always remember there's another game to be played. And another and another. We understand there can never be a game that decides everything until Duke meets Carolina for a national championship. And even then, they'll play again the following February.

The game has gone national for all the wrong reasons. No matter how many books are written on the rivalry, no matter how wide its reclining television audience, no matter how many times the blood is shown flowing from Hansbrough's shattered nose, no one outside this neighborhood understands it because they can't.

No game is bigger than the series, and no incident is bigger than the game. Henderson didn't mean to break Hansbrough's nose, but he did. Henderson apologized, and Hansbrough didn't really accept it. That's where this thing ends, in simple, confusing, controversial closure.

And tonight it begins again at the same rim.

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