When freshman Tyler Hansbrough starts his first game at center tonight for North Carolina, thousands of Tar Heels fans watching in the Smith Center and listening on the radio will be wondering the same thing:

Can this rawboned, baby-faced big man measure up to the challenge of being in, perhaps, the most unusual situation in the program's history?

But 756 miles west, in a small, close-knit community near the southeastern bootheel of Missouri, those downloading UNC's live Webcast already know the answer.

"Every situation he's ever had, where I thought, 'It's going to be difficult' ... he's always come out ahead," said Tyler's dad, Dr. Gene Hansbrough, whose three-bedroom house on Autumn Road will be the site of many Tyler-watching parties this season.

UNC needs him to continue that trend.

The 6-foot-9, 245-pound middle Hansbrough brother has joined a program that lost its top seven players -- 91 percent of its scoring and 88 percent of its rebounding -- after winning the NCAA championship in April. And with only one other teammate on the roster taller than 6-8, UNC may need the McDonald's All-American to be the first freshman in school history to lead the team in both scoring and rebounding in order to have a reasonable chance of returning to the NCAA Tournament.

Hansbrough was not available to comment about the weight of expectations facing him because UNC freshmen are not allowed to talk to the media until after playing in their first regular-season game.

But ask folks who live in and around "The Bluff" -- a town of 17,000 that bleeds maroon after watching Hansbrough lead the Poplar Bluff Mules to their first two state basketball championships in history -- they'll tell you he already has experienced being the center of something special.

"You have to understand -- basketball went from nothing to everything at this school," said Debbie Callahan, who taught Hansbrough math in high school.

"This town has thrived because of Tyler."

Starting early

Not everyone in a community large enough to support a junior college, a new 4,500-seat convention center and at least a half-dozen fast food chains knows Andrew Tyler Hansbrough personally. It just seems like it.

The sporting goods store's assistant manager has a brother who covers the Hansbrough boys for the local newspaper. The receptionist at the Holiday Inn has a boss who attends every high school game. A waiter at Colton's Steakhouse & Grill may not know what Hansbrough's favorite meal is (a 12-ounce sirloin, sweet potato, french salad), but his wife does.

"He's 'Little Tyler' to a lot of people around here," said Richard Browne, who operates a Web site dedicated to Hansbrough -- www.tyler50.com. "Not that he's all that little anymore."

That small-town camaraderie is one of the reasons Hansbrough's parents, who now are divorced, moved from Columbia, Mo., to Poplar Bluff when Tyler was 3.

In a place where teens cruise a half-mile stretch of U.S. 67 on Friday nights and the Wal-Mart is the closest thing to a mall for 80 miles, one of the first orders of business was to pour concrete for a basketball court.

Eventually Gene, an orthopedic surgeon, installed two hoops -- one for shooting, one for dunking.

"One of my favorite memories is of my dad, my two brothers and I playing 21 out there every Sunday,'' said Greg Hansbrough, Tyler's older brother by two years.

Another favorite: playing basketball in the basement.

Even before Tyler attended kindergarten, he used to watch college games on television, sprint downstairs, then copy spin moves, jump shots and dunks, a la Michael Jordan. His parents padded the walls behind the plastic rims so he and his two brothers wouldn't hurt themselves or one another.

"It was incredible," said Gene, whose rubber-floored basement eventually was converted into a home gym for the boys. "He'd come down here, and he'd have the radio on, and he'd bounce the ball -- Bam! Bam! Bam! -- and he'd say, 'That's the band playing; I'm warming up here.'

"And it was always his dream to play in front of a real college band, for him to be warming up and the band really playing."

Gateway to greatness

Back then, it seemed unlikely that the likes of UNC coach Roy Williams, Kentucky's Tubby Smith or Duke's Mike Krzyzewski would feel compelled to visit a place that bills itself as "The Gateway to the Ozarks." Not only is the closest major airport a 2 1/2-hour drive away, golf and football were far and away the most popular sports around town until the Hansbrough boys came along.

When Tyler was 10, his dad took the three brothers to a high school basketball game. Only about 50 people were sprinkled around the 2,700-seat gym.

"Dad," one of the boys said, "we've got to move. No one cares about basketball here."

The father's response: "You keep working, and they will."

Tyler took those words to heart, and to the court, during summer camps and AAU ball. Footwork, rebounding, shooting, passing -- every time he felt someone was beating him at something, he adjusted his workout routine.

"Then two weeks later, people weren't beating him at it anymore," Gene said.

His brothers fed Tyler's work ethic and competitive instinct, as well.

Greg, now a junior at the University of Missouri and a marathon runner, was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 7 1/2. The surgery to remove the tumor rendered his left side partially paralyzed, but he still managed to play basketball at the high school level, catching, shooting and dribbling predominantly with his right hand.

"I think it made us realize how much a person can go through and how much a person can overcome, stuff like that," said Ben, Tyler's younger brother, who has signed a letter of intent to play point guard for Mississippi State.

And the competition among the brothers could be fierce.

"I remember here, we were playing in one of the local gyms, and I went around him and scored a layup on [Tyler]," Ben recalled. "About four seconds later, after the play -- boom! -- he hits me in the mouth, chips one of my teeth. I was like, 'What was that for?' He said, 'Don't score on me again.' "

Growth pattern

By his freshman year of high school, Tyler had shot up to a skinny 6-6. He earned a starting spot on the varsity several games into the season.

"I remember one time he came home when he was a freshman and he said, 'Mom, I don't fit in any of the desks because I'm too big; I can't find shoes because my feet are too big, I don't fit in anywhere,' " said his mother, Tami Wheat, a former Miss Missouri who began having to special order size 16s and make hours-long drives to St. Louis and Memphis to find Big & Tall stores.

Tyler always had been dedicated to his workouts; after he attended the prom with a senior date as a freshman, he was on the phone with his father, asking Gene to rebound for him at a local gym.

Then, the summer after his sophomore season, Hansbrough consulted a nutritionist and took his diet, and his body, to a whole new level.

Beginning with a 4:30 a.m. breakfast that consisted of six eggs, four pieces of toast with natural peanut butter, a bowl of oatmeal, a protein shake and an orange, Hansbrough ate six or seven times a day.

Workouts that included hours of weight training, shooting, tip drills, defensive slides and conditioning enabled him to gain 25 pounds of muscle and add inches to his vertical leap.

"When he came back, you could immediately see a difference," said Mules scorekeeper Tom Hoover, a former player, coach and principal at Poplar Bluff. "He just looked like a man."

Hometown hero

The hard work paid off as Hansbrough averaged 26.5 points and 11.4 rebounds while leading the Mules to their first basketball state championship in 2003-04.

Fans lined up two hours before the junior varsity tipped off in order to secure a seat for the varsity games. Nike outfitted the team. The Mules were invited to play in other parts of the country.

But it was the school's second state title that will resonate with generations of Poplar Bluffians.

Vashon, a basketball powerhouse out of St. Louis that had moved up from Class 4-A to 5-A, was riding a 60-game winning streak when it arrived in Columbia for the championship game.

With 75 percent of the arena filled with folks wearing maroon grinning-Mules logos -- "You could have robbed a bank in downtown Poplar Bluff and no one would have known," said Gene Bess, the basketball coach at Three Rivers Community College -- Tyler scored 29 points, grabbed 16 rebounds and blocked two shots as the Mules won by 16 points.

"It was like 'Hoosiers' around here," Poplar Bluff athletics director Bill Caputo said. "People lined the highway to welcome them back; Tyler stood in that gym and signed autographs for forever."

Pretty big stuff in a town whose most famous former residents include Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator/writer of the hit TV series "Designing Women," as well as NBA star Latrell Sprewell, who played two years at Three Rivers before transferring to Alabama.

"I know little fifth-grade boys who wanted to know where Tyler got his hair cut so they could get their hair cut just like Tyler," Callahan said. "... But he never got a big ego. ... And he taught a lot of kids around here a lesson: If you work hard like he did, you can be successful."

The next step

After watching him average 21 points and 5.5 rebounds in two exhibition games, UNC fans are counting on Hansbrough to adjust quickly to the college game -- especially with Duke's Shelden Williams and Wake Forest's Eric Williams down the road, waiting to test him.

With so few big men backing him up, he'll have to learn to avoid foul trouble, but Roy Williams has said that Hansbrough, whom his teammates have dubbed "Psycho T," is perhaps the most relentless freshman he ever has coached.

None of it surprises the folks in Poplar Bluff.

"He's something special; he's once-in-a-lifetime," Hoover said. "I've been going to basketball games here since 1948, and I knew when he came along he was once-in-a-lifetime."

The town itself has become a Carolina blue outpost.

At Hibbett Sports store, "everything we get with North Carolina on it, we sell," said assistant manager Kathy Frey.

The local newspaper, the Daily American Republic, is running a "Tyler Tracker" after every UNC game.

"He may be hundreds of miles away now, but this town will always support him,'' Callahan said. "We'll be watching."