LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Even after all these years, nearly 20 in the commonwealth of Kentucky, the resident authority on college basketball's fiercest rivalry is easily identifiable as an outsider.

His voice and mannerisms give him away as the worst sort of impostor, a northeastern Yankee interloper. And so because he is not of the rivalry born, some refuse to give him his due, insisting he is little more than a carpetbagging expert.

Yet no one has attempted to do the impossible like Rick Pitino has in his career, straddling the barbed-wire divide between the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville by serving as each school's demigod in residence, their head basketball coach.

If you want to understand and compare this rivalry to other sports feuds, then this is where you go -- inside the office of the man who has been universally beloved and despised by both sides.

Rick Pitino knows what kind of atmosphere to expect when Louisville hosts Kentucky on Saturday. Jim Owens/Icon SMI

And you ask the man who has coached the Celtics and the Knicks, who grew up a Yankees fan in a town cluttered with Mets lovers, the simplest question: How bad is it here?

"Oh," Pitino says, "this is the sickest of them all."

Duke and North Carolina loyalists might disagree; Yankees and Red Sox devotees have a decent argument, too. But the Blue Devils and Tar Heels move on for most of the other 363 days of the year. Boston and New York have Connecticut as a buffer.

Aside from maybe Alabama and Auburn football, it is hard to find such yearlong enmity breeding and cultivating within the state borders like Kentucky. It is like a border-to-border Petri dish of festering vitriol and disdain.

And nowhere does the sickness exist as feverishly as it does in Louisville.

This is where the two fan bases cross-pollinate, if you will, more than anywhere else. You will find Kentucky fans in a place like Murray, a good five-hour drive from Lexington, and sitting boldly in the bar at the Cardinal Hall of Fame Restaurant, just a few blocks from the UL campus. But you will be hard-pressed to find Cardinals fans much beyond the Louisville borders.

"You're the county nut if you're a Louisville fan out in the state somewhere," longtime Louisville radio personality Terry Meiners said.

Which is why Saturday's game between the two schools will be especially entertaining. It is in Louisville, at the Cards' home palace, the Yum! Center. While three early losses for Kentucky has downgraded the excitement nationally from what was expected to be a Final Four rematch between two top-five teams, nothing can quell the zeal here.

"My in-laws live in Louisville, and that's the front lines of all of it," said UK play-by-play man Tom Leach. "People there, they'll look at this game differently because when they go to work, to parties, that's what people talk about because there are fans from both schools in town. You've got to live with the result all year."

It is 1983, and Louisville is ranked No. 2 in the country, trailing only Houston's Phi Slama Jama -- famous for its dunking and "above the rim" style of play -- led by Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon.

NCAA tournament fate brought Louisville and Kentucky back together in 1983. AP Photo / Mark Humphrey

Mark Coomes, who would become a longtime writer at the Louisville Courier-Journal, refers to it now as his "Year of Living Dangerously." He was a student at Kentucky then, but a Louisville fan, a troublesome intersection for a guy who liked to talk and wasn't afraid to fight to back up his words. There were more than a few verbal spats and a couple of physical ones at the Sigma Nu house, thanks largely to the fraternity brother who refused to root for the Wildcats.

Like a lot of Cardinals fans, Coomes was fed up. His first real basketball memory came in 1972, when new coach Denny Crum led Louisville to the Final Four. But despite that, and a national championship in 1980, the Cards still were treated like second-class citizens in their own state.

Big Blue then was an impossible pandemic to overcome, bred and fostered through decades of impressive achievement, especially compared to everyone else in the commonwealth.

And for 24 years, Kentucky had steadfastly refused to play Louisville. There was never a reason given, not a good one at least, but the notion at least among Louisville fans was that UK wouldn't deign to play its urban neighbor, as if all that success still didn't make the Cardinals a worthy foe.

All feuds start somewhere, with a perceived slight or a real one. This was the start for UK and UL, and more for the city of Louisville and its red-wearing fans.

"Here's Louisville coming up, shooting off its mouth and everybody but Cat fans knew we were every bit as good a program by then," Coomes said. "But they wouldn't play us."

The history is far more complex than the present. Today, this is just a game, joy for the winner and sorrow for the loser in a statewide battle for bragging rights. Then, it was so much more. It was about race and demographics, urban versus rural, the staid versus the new.

Louisville embraced integration far earlier than its reluctant neighboring state school, and Crum's teams were a personification of the time, unapologetically brash and loud, wearing their Afros big and playing the game with style and flair.

By comparison, Kentucky under Joe B. Hall was straight-laced and conservative, unwavering to the changing times.

"It wasn't until high school that I really ran into the racial overtones," Coomes said. "I'd say, 'But y'all have black players, too.' And people would say, 'We have black players. Y'all have n------.' I had no idea that was behind it all."