But could a city help him -- or Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski -- win another national basketball title?

Tonight's Duke-Carolina showdown at Cameron Indoor Stadium will decide the winner of the ACC regular season and the top seed in the league's tournament in Charlotte next week.

But it could also determine the No. 1 seed in the NCAA's East Regional, where two key games will be played in Charlotte for a trip to the Final Four.

While both coaches downplay the importance of staying in-state until the Final Four -- both are virtual locks to play the first two tournament rounds in Raleigh -- consider this:

* The No. 6 Blue Devils are 28-4 in North Carolina during the NCAA Tournament, including two wins in Greensboro during its 2001 national title run.

* Top-ranked UNC is 21-1 in its home state in the NCAA Tournament. In 1982, it won once in Charlotte and twice in Raleigh en route to the New Orleans Final Four -- and a national championship.

"It would be a shame not to get that, and not to play in North Carolina the whole way," UNC junior Marcus Ginyard said in late January, when he also predicted that it would come down to his team and the Blue Devils for the Queen City spot.

Duke wing Gerald Henderson, who likes to travel, would personally prefer a flight to the sunny West Coast, but "I'm sure for Coach and the team, though, it'd be better to just stay [in North Carolina]."

Although UNC enters the game with the better ranking (No. 1 in the AP, compared with No. 6 for Duke), it is also in a spot where it needs to win.

Duke (26-3, 13-2 ACC) won the season's first meeting between the two, 89-78 at the Smith Center. Sweeping the regular season tonight could put the Blue Devils a hop, skip and a jump from a return trip down I-85.

A victory by the Tar Heels (28-2, 13-2), meanwhile, could give them an advantage -- especially because point guard Ty Lawson, who missed the first game, is back from injury. In that case, it could come down to which team goes farther in the league tournament.

Thomas O'Connor, athletic director at George Mason and chairman of the NCAA Tournament selection committee, wouldn't speculate on how tonight's game would affect the tournament brackets because both teams have games left to play. But when it comes to seedings, he said league records could be a factor.

"There's a voting process, and then we talk about the quantitative and qualitative; that's where conference play may come in from a common-sense standpoint,'' he said. "... If there are multiple teams from a conference, we would take a look at how they finished in their conference during the year, to make sure that there's a common sense factor when we're in seeding. But how they fare against the rest of the field still supercedes that."

Of course, there are other factors that go into the seedings, such as final rankings, computer rankings, and how teams fare over the last 10 games of the season and more.

Memphis, Texas, UCLA, Kansas and Tennessee are also in the hunt for NCAA top seeds, and the Volunteers (tops in the computer rankings but ranked fourth in the polls) in particular could scramble the Triangle's in-state hopes: Charlotte is the closest regional site to Knoxville.

All those considerations are why Williams and Krzyzewski say they are more worried about how their teams are playing come tournament time, rather than where.

"I just think wherever we're going, wherever we show up, let's play and prepare to play against the team we're playing against,'' Krzyzewski said.

Because even close to home, you never know what's going to happen.

In 1995, for instance, Kansas fans were thrilled at the prospect of advancing to nearby Kansas City for the round of 16.

"And we did,'' said Williams, who coached the Jayhawks at the time. "We played two great games and went to Kansas City and got our butts kicked."

That's why, while he'd like to end up in Charlotte, he doesn't think it will impact his team's title chances if they play elsewhere.

"I've never seen a [darn] building help me win a game yet," he said. "But how you play, that's got a lot to do with it."