NEW ORLEANS — There was never anything inevitable about the collision course that Duke and North Carolina find themselves on, not this season at least. Historically, certainly the odds were that two programs of such longstanding and explosive success would cross paths at some point. If not now, someday.
The postseason meeting in the 1971 NIT was like a fossil in the geological record, a reminder from the past that everything old will become new again, that the right circumstances occurred once, and could again. And they have.
But those circumstances didn’t exist in November or December or January or February. Neither team was in a position to get this far. They developed on not-quite parallel tracks, very different paths for both teams that led to the same point, and had the same driving force at their core.
