You probably don’t remember much about the 1939 Duke-Carolina football game.
And no, I wasn’t there. Quit smirking.
Duke won that game 13-3 on the way to an 8-1 season.
It was North Carolina’s only loss that season; they also tied Tulane and finished 8-1-1
Duke went into that game ranked 13th in the AP poll. North Carolina was seventh.
That’s the last time Duke and North Carolina have played a football game in which both teams were nationally ranked.
Mull that one over for awhile. November 18, 1939, only a few months after the beginning of World War II, the same year Lou Gehrig retired, the year Gone With the Wind won the Oscar for best movie.
There haven’t even been that many near misses. Had the officials not royally bungled the end of the 2015 Duke-Miami game then the following week’s next game would have ended that streak.
And let’s be honest. Duke has usually been the team not holding up its end of the bargain. Not that North Carolina is a periennial national power or anything. But they’ve never gone 0-11 in consecutive seasons either.
Earlier this season the two rivals seemed headed for an epic match-up, maybe two top-10 teams, a game with national implications.
That dream died hard.
But if Duke-Carolina football isn’t the national rivalry we’re accustomed to seeing on the hardwood, it’s still a local rivalry of ferocity, intensity, maybe even hate, inasmuch as a college sporting event can engender an emotion probably best left for other things.
If you’re a Duke fan living in North Carolina, especially the Triangle, you can feel like you’re on a lifeboat surrounded by sharks. Duke is a small school by D-1 football standards, with relatively few students and relatively few alumni, a private school whose alumni base is geographically dispersed across the planet.
And surrounded by two, large, state-supported universities in the same conference, with student bodies, alumni bases and “subway alumni” larger in number and closer in proximity than anything Duke can muster.
Grocery store, Barnes and Noble, next-door neighbors. They are everywhere. Wolfies and Tar Heels.
Trust me. I’ve lived in the Triangle since 1968. But UNC is the school eight miles away, the school Duke has played every single season beginning in 1922; they even played twice in 1943, for obvious reasons. Duke’s biggest rival, even on the gridiron. The Victory Bell, bragging rights, maybe the mythical Big Four Championship. It’s all there, once a year, every single season.
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