North Carolina fans recall the 1957 basketball season as the one that brought the Tar Heels their first NCAA championship, but the implications of that run extend well beyond Chapel Hill.

UNC defeated Kansas in three overtimes to win the national title. Former Carolina player Bob Cunningham, now deceased, later said that none other than former Jayhawk All-American and Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain, also now deceased, credited the Tar Heels with putting the new Atlantic Coast Conference on the map with that win.

"Wilt Chamberlain said that team really gave standing to the ACC," Cunningham said. "McGuire does deserve a lot of credit."

That would be Coach Frank McGuire, who was hired to combat N.C. State's Everett Case and the Wolfpack, which had established itself as the regional power in basketball.

But basketball remained secondary to football in importance. The Carolina-Duke rivalry centered on football more than basketball when McGuire first arrived in Chapel Hill.

Former national player of the year Lennie Rosenbluth said that when he played on the freshmen team his first year at Carolina (freshmen were ineligible for varsity play at that time) hardly anyone even attended the varsity games at Woollen Gym.

"They gave you two complimentary tickets," Rosenbluth said. "I couldn't give them away. Nobody wanted tickets to the game."

Just three years before, seven schools gathered in Greensboro and broke out from the 17-member Southern Conference to form a new athletic conference. Later in 1953, Virginia joined the original seven members to bring the total of the new Atlantic Coast Conference to eight members.

The sole purpose of this new league was to promote football. Basketball really did not enter the conversation. Television revenues were not a part of the athletic equation yet, so gate receipts and a tie-in with one of the big-four bowls (Orange, Sugar, Cotton or Rose) was the plum the league sought and earned with a contract to send its champion to the Orange Bowl.

What happened in 1957, not just the winning on the court but the start of ACC basketball on television, steered a conference still in its infancy down a new path, away from football and headlong into basketball glory.

A former Carolina student named C.D. Chesley broadcast the national semifinals and championship game back to North Carolina in 1957. Combined with Carolina's victory, the introduction of television lit a fuse to an explosive of interest with fans and recruits in basketball that exists to this day.

While the Southeastern Conference has become known as the preeminent football league, ask sports fans anywhere in the country about the ACC and basketball will be the sport that is mentioned. Just this past April, Carolina once again reemphasized this status by winning another national championship, the school's fifth overall and fourth since the 1957 team went 32-0 and staged what was known as "McGuire's Miracle."

Eventually, it turned the Duke-Carolina basketball games into one of the defining rivalries in all of sport and the No. 1 matchup in college basketball each season.

The pride of their accomplishment as Carolina's first NCAA titlist and the team that sowed the seeds for basketball in this region has always remained with the players from that team.

When the school held a ceremony several years ago to dedicate a new floor at Woollen Gym, the building in which the 1957 team played its home games, professor of exercise and sport science -- and the historian of Woollen -- Ron Hyatt summarized perfectly where the 1957 team its into Carolina's rich 100-year history of basketball and what it means to the ACC.

"You validated the ACC conference in its early days and made it a basketball conference," Hyatt said, addressing the five players who attended the ceremony. "You played on the Woollen Gym floor, but your success helped to build Carmichael in the '60s for Coach [Dean] Smith and it helped to build the Smith Center because we build on what you call the Carolina Family.

"You refused to quit. You were first-rate people then, and you return part of yourselves today, and we are grateful for it. You were and you are champions."