Blythe's book tracks the history of the North Carolina-Duke rivalry and looks at why Duke is evil and North Carolina is all that is pure about this planet earth. The season he writes about in the book ended with the Tar Heels beating our Illini in the national championship game, but he's so freaking good that we only slightly begrudge him this.

After the jump, he wraps up a big win for the Heels over the beloved Blue Devils.

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The weeping is over now. The cameras have stopped panning for tears. The abandoned tents of Krzyzewskiville flap in the wind. Soon that UN refugee camp for the rich victims of Wednesday night's catastrophe will be bulldozed. Donations may be made on behalf of the unfortunate through Deadspin, which will make sure that the money reaches its proper destination. (Ed. Note: As long as we don't use Paypal!)

A straggling thought or two on last night's Duke-Carolina slugfest:

If Deadspin readers are any indication, there's some animosity brewing out there in America towards both Duke and Carolina, otherwise known as the douchemongers and the twatwaffles, as one reader so eloquently put it. I blame ESPN for cramming the rivalry down the novelty-starved throat of America, and for leading the gullible to believe that Duke and North Carolina may be viewed interchangeably.

Admittedly, the game itself was ugly. To use the standards of "American Bandstand," it lacked a good beat. Maybe the defense was that savage, maybe the offense (until very late for North Carolina) was that bad. But there was just no rhythm. As my friend Doug put it, there was a lot of "thwartedness" going on. Even so, even so, my cantankerous Deadspin friends, the game possessed an intensity that Marquette versus Peoria State has tended to lack.

Astonishingly, however, the game gave rise to miniature golf tycoon Billy Packer's finest moment as a sportscaster and human being. Only those of us in the Durham-Chapel Hill area, where the ESPN broadcast was fortunately blacked out, sparing us the passion of Dick Vitale, got to hear Packer on the local broadcast. In the second half, just as the Tar Heels began to close on the Blue Devils, Packer started to obsess on-air about Duke's unseemly decision to credit the team's losses during the star-crossed season of 1995 to Krzyzewski's assistant Pete Gaudet. That was the season that Coach K took a powder, as it were, for his bad back and disappeared from public view like an actor going to rehab. "I think the losses should be credited to Krzyzewski," Packer ranted.

But it wasn't enough for him to assert his own view. He then proceeded to lasso his broadcast partner into the debate. "What do you think?" Packer asked, bullying his colleague the same way the Blue Devils were knocking Tyler Hansbrough around. His partner kept trying to evade the question by paying tribute to the game's marvelous freshmen. "Let's talk about the freshmen," he said.

Packer wasn't having it. While clips ran of Duke's Jon Scheyer bombing from three and North Carolina's Brandan Wright hooking and dunking inside, he forced his partner to chime in with his own opinion (as if he cared). "I think the losses should go to Krzyzewski," his partner grudgingly agreed.

Billy, I admit that I joined an entire coliseum in booing you at the ACC Tournament in 2005 when you received an award for your contributions to the league. To be honest, I booed until I was hoarse. So did everyone seated around me. Wake fans, State fans, UNC fans — you brought us all together in a moment of mystical harmony. We all thought of you as an insufferable, sour-spirited know-it-all. But now I see a prophet without honor in his own land who speaks truth to power. I love you, man.

Blythe's book tracks the history of the North Carolina-Duke rivalry and looks at why Duke is evil and North Carolina is all that is pure about this planet earth. The season he writes about in the book ended with the Tar Heels beating our Illini in the national championship game, but he's so freaking good that we only slightly begrudge him this.

After the jump, he previews tonight's Duke-North Carolina game. He'll have a game wrapup tomorrow.

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I've got a bad feeling about this one. So does my mother, but then, as the Oswald Spengler of North Carolina basketball, she always has a bad feeling. We could be playing Iona, and my mother would have a bad feeling. If only Donald Rumsfeld shared her capacity for divining disaster

Me, I'm different. I don't usually have a bad feeling and when I do, it's usually a ruse to mislead the gods, to go humbly into the victory store and like a neatly-dressed shoplifter, sneak out with a win stuffed under my parka. Why the gods care that much about placating my bad feeling, I don't know. But sometimes they do. At other times my bad feeling functions as a prophylactic — an attempt to protect my fragile psyche from suffering the worst (Carolina loss to Duke) by rehearsing that defeat for hours ahead of time. But not this time. This time I've got a real bad feeling.

The bad feeling started when Duke lost 68-67 to Florida State at Cameron on Sunday, the first time the Criminoles had won there in fifteen years. After the game, Al Thornton stood on Krzyzewski Floor facing the Crazies, nodding his head and clapping, shouting "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" Nearby, his teammates popped their jerseys. Harmless enough in our demonstrative age — these guys didn't show enough attitude to be also-rans on American Idol, but the students booed just the same. At least the Crazies didn't run out onto the court to protect the jump circle by surrounding it and making tiny little fists, as they have done in the past, embarrassing us all in the process.

I find myself in the heretical position of wondering whether it might not have been better for North Carolina if the Blue Devils had beaten FSU. I worry that Duke, coming off two ACC losses in a row and playing at Cameron, will be a cornered beast. The Blue Devils will be slapping the floor, they'll be thumping chests and screaming in each other's faces. Testosterone will be spraying all over the court like Gatorade. I can't stand the thought of Josh McRoberts snarling and grimacing anymore than he already does. Every time a call goes against the Duke center, you can read his lips shouting "Fuck!" (Watch tonight on ESPN's special "fuck cam," and you'll see what I mean.) You can also read his coach's lips, only they are saying something more like "Fuck you!" And that could be to either his own players or the refs — either will do.

Unless my friend Doug comes through with two tickets to Cameron — he has more juice than I do — we'll all be watching the game in Chapel Hill with my mother in the family room just off the kitchen. I'm down south from New York to do a few readings and radio appearances to promote the paperback version of my book, To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever. My main sport these days is self-promotion (thank you, Deadspin!). And as an entrepreneurial man of schemes, I was prepared to take a laissez-faire attitude towards tonight's first regular season match-up. Basketball is one thing, but racking up paperback sales — sweet Jesus! What can compare? And I'm competing, too, baby, signing that stock as fast as legibility allows. "You're pretty good," the manager of one Barnes & Noble said, "but you're no Jimmy Carter."

"How many can he do?" I asked, popping my blue oxford just like the Criminoles.

"16 every 60 seconds," she said. "But he won't personalize."

"Yeah, but I personalize," I said. Jimmy Carter won't personalize. Wasn't that the reason he failed to be re-elected? When will the man ever learn?

Maybe self-promotion would have been enough for me, a way out of the obsessive fandom that for decades has retarded my growth as a moral being. But then something terrible happened. North Carolina also lost last weekend — to former arch-rival NC State. Roy Williams was thoroughly out-coached by rookie Sidney Lowe, whose undermanned squad spread the floor on offense and worked the shot clock, in the process inscribing a classic blue print for how to beat the more talented racehorses of UNC. On defense, the Wolfpack clogged the middle and mugged Tyler Hansbrough, as do most teams. The Tar Heels appeared at a loss as to how they might combat this.

The defeat sent many Carolina partisans to a consideration of the previously unthinkable — is Roy Williams a good game coach? Without question, he's a great recruiter, a terrific motivator, and he says "friggin'" more than any man in the world. But how about mid-game adjustments? One of my favorite posters on the Inside Carolina web site, the often gloomy Brownie (gloomy, I suspect, because he's such an obsessed fan that he must anticipate and acknowledge imperfection; would that our foreign policy experts displayed such realism) put the issue aeronautically.

"Roy is not a 'game coach,' he wrote. "He doesn't fly the plane. He gasses it up, loads on the captain, the crew, the passengers, shows them how to fly, and then puts the plane on automatic pilot. Sometimes, halfway through the trip, he yells at everybody and throws some chair, and then puts the plane back on automatic pilot again."

I fear that the Blue Devils are in a much better position than NC State to execute the Wolfpack's winning strategy and exploit North Carolina's impatience to gambol up and down in a full-court game. I fear that with Duke at risk of going .500 in conference for the first time since the beautiful tenure of Pete Gaudet, the Blue Devils will play like a team of thugs on speed. I fear that at Cameron, where the refs lose track of time (poor Clemson) and fouls, thuggishness will win. I fear that DeMarcus Nelson or Jon Scheyer will have big offensive games for the Devils. I fear that the North Carolina freshmen — in particular, the starting trio of Wayne Ellington, Ty Lawson, and Brandan Wright (who spurned Duke in a major recruiting reversal) — will betray impatience and play too fast. I fear that Roy won't call any time-outs until it is too late. I fear the Tar Heels will close too slowly on the three-point shot.

I fear that Duke will win and my mother's abiding sense that the universe is brimming over with doom will be confirmed (such is the effect of a Duke victory in our household).

I've got a bad feeling, yes I do. But maybe if I say all these things, none of them will come true.

Blythe follows his beloved Tar Heels around during what would become their championship season and ends up spending time in the enemy camp — even talking to the Evil Mastermind himself, Coach K. (He makes him cry. Really.) It's an impartial, greatly amusing and kinda sweet screed about what it means to be a fan and why, in the end, having someone (like Duke) to personify all the hatred you have inside is, well ... healthy.

After the jump, Blythe talks about his book, why sportswriting is a horrible profession and where he'll be watching this Saturday's big Duke-UNC game.

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First off, it's frustrating to us that the big moment at the end of your book involves North Carolina winning the national championship ... over our Illini. You Chapel Hill people get great teams every five years or so, but we Illini usually just stumble across one every 20. It seems unfair.

You gotta enjoy them while you can. I think Illinois' big men are actually better this year than they were last year, though. (James Augustine) has really brought it up a level.

Yeah, yeah. First off, you talk a lot in the book about the difference between your "journalist" side — the one that wants to be "fair" — and the "beast" side, which just wants to see Duke destroyed and the entire team ripped to shreds. We kind of think the "journalist" side of people is less honest the "beast" side, and that the reason a lot of mainstream sportswriting is so bloodless and bland is because reporters spend so much time pretending to be "impartial" that they lose the "beast" fan side ... and end up just thinking of sports as some job — one they ultimately hate. Did you find it jarring, as essentially a rabid fan, to cover last year s team alongside mainstream beat reporters who are so caught up in their own ways?

When I was a kid, I thought, "Oh, what a great thing to be a beat writer." Once I spent some time with some of these beat reporters, I thought this has to be the saddest job next to being, like, a street sweeper or something. It s worse. They may deep down have partisan allegiances, but to see them, they seem — in general — really sour-spirited about sports. I was there more as like a hobbyist, which is the way I like to cover things anyway. You can look at things in a way that, when it s your profession to cover all these games, seem to fall off your radar screen. You know, in the '60s, when you had these guys coming in covering the act of covering politics, you saw a real breakthrough in political journalism. I felt that way a little bit doing this, like I was lucky to be able to trespass through all these different zones.

It seems like a lot of mainstream sports journalism is set up to make the reporter not enjoy sports anymore.

Exactly. A lot of mainstream sports journalism these days are business stories. I used to turn to the sports pages because I didn't want to read the business pages. A lot of the time now, the stories feel very similar.

Let's look at Duke. You re obviously a North Carolina fan, so you re programmed to hate Duke. But these days, everybody hates Duke. Do you think it's just because they've been successful?

In the '80s, for some strange reason, there was a brief moment where Duke was America's Team. In the book, I compare them to a boy band. They were sort of well-scrubbed, cute guys — if you can call Jay Bilas and those guys cute. Somehow over the next 10 years, they became America's most hated team. It was fascinating, and very gratifying to see.

I asked Coach K when I saw him [for the book] why he thought Duke was America s most hated team. Initially, he parried the questions, but finally he said it was because Duke won a lot, and anytime someone wins a lot, they become hated. But I don't think that's it; there's a lot of teams out there that win a lot.

I think it's that Duke has become the embodiment of a public relations team. Duke's rise happened to coincide with the rise of cable TV, the rise of ESPN and in particular Dick Vitale, who is the ultimate frontrunner. People began to take umbrage with the way the media had this reflexive description of "Duke is the preeminent program that is both academic and successful in basketball." They started talking about the Duke players as if these guys were all young philosophers from 5th Century Athens. And they were just basketball players. People sensed the disconnect between that perception and reality, and it got on people's nerves.

One of the things we love about doing this site is that we don t actually have to talk to athletes, who, on the whole — with exceptions of course — are boring and risk-averse. It allows us to be honest about our lack of impartiality. But as a Duke hater, you actually went and talked to Coach K and some of their players, seeing them as humans. Was that hard to jive that with the hatred of them you write about so fluently?

That's a great advantage of your site. That way you can say whatever you wish and you don t have to listen to the same answers over and over.

I interviewed Coach K for about two hours. I hated the guy. Hated him, based on screaming at him through the TV for 25 years. So I got really nervous going to interview him, not because I thought he'd detect that I hated him — though I thought he might — but because, well, what if I liked him? That would really screw up this enjoyable pastime for me. Talking to him, it humanized him to some extent, but still, he came across as the type of guy who stalks the sidelines and screams at refs. I went in there and had my encounter, and it briefly softened my view of him. But now, having been out of there for a few months, I find myself completely reverting to form and hating him again.

But yeah. You see beat reporters, and they'll write something that's controversial, or even slightly edgy, and suddenly access becomes a problem. It's a weird circle.

Where you watching the game this Saturday?

I'll end up watching with my mother at her house. My mother and I still talk after every game. In a way, she s kind of the hero of the book. I somehow feel that her journey to this kind of fandom is pretty extraordinary, and her passion is refreshing.

You can guy the book at your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.