"College ball -- you can't really beat it," Hull said. "They do it because they love it."

And, it seems more fans are loving women's basketball, too. ACC teams Duke, UNC and Maryland all played several sold-out games during the regular season. The semifinals and finals of the ACC tournament also sold out earlier this month.

Host school N.C. State reported 4,073 came to Sunday's first two-game session -- the first game featuring the Kay Yow-inspired Wolfpack. The second session -- featuring the nation's top team, Duke's Blue Devils -- drew 4,560. That's enough to fill the courtside seats on the lower level of the 19,500-seat RBC Center.

Preston Chandler and William Billings, both N.C. State freshmen, became fans of women's basketball -- mainly Wolfpack fans -- when they started going to the Raleigh university, and because of Wolfpack Coach Kay Yow's fight with breast cancer.

"We wanted to support these guys because we feel they deserve it," Chandler said. "Coach Yow's been in the hospital. They've gone through a lot of hard times; they play hard; and they beat a lot of teams."

The scrappy team's winning season, 24-9, draws Billings.

N.C. State upset a tough UNC team, that otherwise has lost only to Duke, in the regular season. Then State handed Duke its only loss of the year at the ACC tournament. The tough competition makes each game exciting, he said.

"They're the No. 4 seed. That's impressive, especially with everything with Coach Yow," he said. "They showed that if they just stayed together, they can do anything."

Hull, 24, is mainly a die-hard Duke fan, but heck, she "just loooves basketball.

"Women's basketball is more team-oriented than men's," she said. "Women run through more sets; with guys, it's a lot of one-on-one."

A statistics teacher at Northwestern High School in Rock Hill, S.C., Hull coaches the school's ninth-grade girls basketball team. She also has spent the past seven summers coaching for a basketball camp at Duke University, where she works with young children up to high schoolers.

"I think the women's game is catching up to the men's teams. Look at this," she said, pointing to the crowd at the RBC Center Sunday. "You couldn't see this five years ago."

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