At about 7:55 Saturday night, N.C. State and Florida State finally completed a football game that had begun about four hours and 30 minutes earlier. Florida State clinched another ACC championship with its 50-44 victory in double overtime -- a game that for drama's sake was every bit the equal of another game that decided a conference title, State's 103-100 basketball victory over Maryland in 1974.

Wake Forest basketball fans may one day look back and see it as a defining period in the program's history. It was early April. Pittsburgh had lost Ben Howland to UCLA and wanted to hire a successor quickly. Demon Deacons coach Skip Prosser was the Panthers' primary target. Contact was made and an offer extended.

There were lots of empty seats in Kenan Stadium on Saturday. With about 25,000 vacancies in the 60,000-seat facility, folks had plenty of space to stretch out, lean back, grab a little breathing room.

It was mid-February when Georgia Tech's B.J. Elder first started to realize that his team's bright basketball future could suddenly turn foggy. Elder and his teammates had heard the talk, then saw it in print: Tech freshman Chris Bosh was high first-round NBA draft material.

With a victory today at Clemson, Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden will mark his 74th birthday by claiming a ninth outright ACC championship and his 18th double-digit win season. "If winning like that is a part of getting old, I can't wait to age some more," Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen said before the season.

The new face of the Big East will be round, as in roundball. After Tuesday's much anticipated makeover, the league will remain as confusing and disjointed as ever. It'll also be substantially weaker in football. But by adding Cincinnati, Louisville and Marquette, among others, to compensate for the loss of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, the Big East may have built the nation's most dominant basketball conference.

My guess is it's not over between Philip Rivers and Matt Schaub. These two classic and entirely classy quarterbacks will meet again some day, possibly several days, in the future.

Lots of tricks, few treats. That's ACC football two months into the season. What was supposed to be a breakthrough season for the conference has been more like a breakdown. Of the four ACC teams widely expected to be ranked in the Top 25, only Florida State remains, at No. 5, in The Associated Press poll.

Duke didn't win Saturday in Wallace Wade Stadium, but Ted Roof did. On his first game day as the Blue Devils' interim head football coach, Roof and his team delivered the sort of spirited performances the program long has gone without. By day's end, heavily favored N.C. State was lucky to get out with a 28-21 win. Had it not been for Wolfpack quarterback Philip Rivers, plus a couple of his talented receivers and some solid pass blocking, Roof would have gone home with the highest winning percentage of any coach in Duke history.

Red Wilson shook his head in obvious bewilderment one day after being fired as Duke's football coach in 1982. "I just don't know what more they expect," he said of the school's administration.

It's not clear whether NCAA members will buy an ACC proposal based on the need for added income.

It's got to be someone with head-coaching experience or the next best thing to it. That needs to be the motto Duke cannot abandon in its search for Carl Franks' successor as head football coach.