Greetings from Cameron

DURHAM, N.C. -- So here's how we'll end this today. The atmosphere here at Cameron Indoor is unbelievable. Simply, the students are amazing. And while I suspect that some of them are preening for television cameras, the energy is just constant and completely hostile. I quite enjoyed it. The whole thing is a pretty convincing argument for what big time Division I athletics do for an university. There is no reason for anyone to have heard on a tiny private college in North Carolina (and, there are a few, like say, Davidson, that play D-I sports and you probably haven't heard of). Great basketball can do that for a school. Maybe great football can do that for a school too, although there aren't a whole lot of tiny schools that are really good at football.

Final: Columbia 95, UCD 90: The teams traded lulls in the second half. UCD's cost it the lead. Columbia's saw the Aggies pull to within a point with just under three minutes to go. It was a better showing, but you'd expect that against an inferior team. Columbia has a chance to be competitive in the Ivy League. Georgia Southern, based on the first part of the season, is a better right now. The game story will be in tomorrow's Enterprise. I'm going to stick around here for the Duke game.

Halftime: UCD 46, Columbia 41 UCD dialed back the fullcourt pressure as the half wore on. There are nine players dressed, but Gary Stewart appears to be using Jesse Lopez Low judiciously. UCD had a spurt before the half, but a ticky-tack foul call and Brett Loscalzo's 35-footer to end the half made it closer. We'll see if the Aggies can keep it up. The crowd is starting to fill in. Mostly, they're holding space for the Duke game tonight. A large portion of the contingent seems to have brought its homework. That might catch on at UC Davis.

1:17: UCD is trying to play uptempo without as much in the way of manpower, but having success. The pressure is causing Columbia problems. Columbia has been lights out from 3-point range to start. The most energy in the earlygoing, however, has come from the skeleton crew of Cameron Crazies, who spent the first two minutes running up-and-down the mostly empty bleachers chasing the ball. A bit of trivia: both teams lost by 43 points last night.

12:30 p.m.: Thomas Juillerat and Rommel Marentez are wearing suits today, and probably will for the foreseeable future. Both are on crutches (which is was a problem because UCD only travels with one pair of crutches). Juillerat had X-rays at Duke Medical Center, running into noteworthy Blue Devil alum Jason Williams while he was there, and those were negative. But Juillerat said it was pretty bad. I was told that Marentez's injury is a bad sprain. There are no timeframes yet, but think weeks, not days.

12:10 p.m: It is 80 minutes before tip-off and I’m sitting in the most unassuming building on earth. Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium is a small gray stone building on a campus full of gray stone buildings. About the only thing that appears to set it apart is the sign were the 10 or students already camped outside and waiting to get in. UC Davis vs. Columbia at lunch time on the West Coast probably was not the game my bosses had in mind when they green-lighted this trip. But here we are. I’ll be keeping this updated throughout the day as best as I can.