Imagine being in a crowd at a professional hockey game drinking a soft drink, sharing a sandwich with your wife when your cell phone goes off. It is a working opportunity to live your dream. Minutes later, you are in bowels of the arena, strapping on pads and skates and headed onto the ice.

Within an hour, you’d become the stuff of legends. An NHL team would have a t-shirt on sale in their team store with your name and number on it. Your cell phone would burn up with media requests. Airline tickets would be ordered so you could be celebrated with a standing ovation as Ayres was last night.

If you follow college basketball, you know the near-mythical rivalry that is Duke-North Carolina. Over the last 100 games between these two teams coming into their matchup over the weekend, each school had won 50 and they scored the exact same number of points. Those freaky statistics make clear this isn’t a gimme type of series—each team brings its best whenever the game is played.

That being said, I wasn’t expecting much from this game: it’s been a brutal season in Chapel Hill, with the Tar Heels sitting at 10-12 overall and 3-8 in the ACC at tipoff. Duke, on the other hand, came in ranked seventh in the nation and hadn’t been out of the top 10 all season. A blowout seemed to be in order.