Today is one of my two most superstitious days of the year: the second Carolina-Duke basketball game.

Let's honour this glorious day of pride in alma mater, through the noble process of hating a worthy but despicable adversary.

I give you the late Charles Kuralt, fervent Tar Heel:

I was asked to speak here tonight, because during the bicentennial I was the guy who stood there in front of the President of the United States and said that I was there to speak for all of us who could not afford to go to Duke... and would not have gone there even if we could have.

We have great affection for Duke University.  All of us in this room know how important it is to our state, and know how important the rivalry is.  And if there had never been a Duke (which of course there was not, during most of the distinguished history of the University of North Carolina); if there had never been a Duke, we would have had to invent it.

We would have made it a place with severe gothic arches and ivy growing out of the walls, to persuade the more naive undergraduates that they had been admitted to Yale after all.

And we would have given it a towering national reputation (in some odd things, like parapsychology and the rice diet), but a national reputation.

We would have sent Richard Nixon there to study constitutional law.