Luke DeCock: Anticipation blooms as college basketball season begins, a promising one for Triangle

RALEIGH, N.C. — The basketball season we’ve all been waiting for begins Monday night. A freshman phenom. An old-school fifth-year star. A double banner-raising. Two top 10 teams and another hoping to prove everybody wrong again.

Finally, a season that has everything.

It’s been a long time since fans of all three Triangle schools had this much to be excited about. It’s a rare year when Duke doesn’t have title aspirations, but Cooper Flagg puts a new polish on them. R.J. Davis leads a veteran North Carolina backcourt that’s looking to get back to playing at the Tar Heels’ traditional blistering pace.

N.C. State’s prospects may again be uncertain after yet another transfer-portal retooling, but the good feelings from March will linger for a long time, and it’s not like the Wolfpack is starting from scratch with Jayden Taylor, Michael O’Connell and Ben Middlebrooks having made themselves household names. And after years as a fourth wheel, Wake Forest looks ready to crash the Big Four party again.

The ACC, too, figures to have a better look to it, even with Tony Bennett’s sudden-but-not-so-shocking departure from Virginia. Steve Forbes has his best team yet at Wake while Miami, Clemson and Pittsburgh will all threaten again and resurgent Louisville won’t be propping up the bottom of the league anymore. That burden now falls to new arrivals Cal and Stanford, ready to sink the ACC’s NET rating alongside Boston College.

There is an opportunity to neutralize that.

You like big nonconference games? They don’t get any bigger than UNC at Kansas in the It’s Not Immoral To Love Two Institutions Classic, to borrow from Roy Williams, who may have borrowed from Dean Smith.

It’s not the first meeting of these cross-pollinated programs — usually, those schools meet late in the NCAA tournament at CBS’ request … er, out of pure coincidence — but it’ll be a historic night when North Carolina visits the campus that bills itself as the birthplace of UNC basketball.

Duke’s schedule is full of those kinds of tests: new-look Kentucky in the Champions Classic, the return game at Arizona, the Blue Devils’ own neutral-site matchup with Kansas. The ACC-SEC Challenge serves up more must-see TV in a pair of rivalry crossovers: Auburn in Durham, Alabama in Chapel Hill. (UNC could end up playing Auburn in Maui as well.)

N.C. State gets Kansas too — if Kansas played Wake this season, the Big Four would be the Big Five, sorry Philadelphia — along with Texas and a Final Four rematch against Purdue after a five-game pseudo-preseason. The Wolfpack has until Thanksgiving to figure things out, but in any case, there are plenty of opportunities to make an early season statement.

Against all of that, Monday’s opener’s — Duke hosting Maine in an inverse Flagg homecoming game, UNC hosting Elon, N.C. State hosting USC-Upstate — don’t really stand out, with the exception of the Wolfpack’s two new tapestries, but the anticipation is delicious.

Is there better basketball yet to come? Absolutely. But unlike some Novembers, it’s practically guaranteed to follow.

The true golden years of the ACC are long in the past, but this is shaping up as the kind of basketball season that not only harkens back to those days, but leaves an imprint of its own. Soak it up. Who knows how long, in this football-crazy world, it will last.

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