My freshman year at Maryland, I bruised a butt muscle trying to sleep on the old, hard seats at Cole Field House. We were camping out for student tickets to a game against North Carolina, the standard of the ACC: Dean Smith, Jerry Stackhouse, those Alexander Julian-designed uniforms. We hated it all. We hated North Carolina, Duke, Virginia, sometimes even N.C. State and the other schools, because we assumed — no, we knew — they all looked down on us. They didn’t respect Maryland, even though we’d been their conference mates from the beginning. We had a love-hate relationship with the ACC. We hated most of them and loved beating them. So damn right we camped out for tickets, bruised our butt muscles and celebrated when Maryland beat North Carolina. We beat the standard of the ACC.



Laron Profit arrived at Maryland the year after me in 1995. He was a very good wing player who once, during an ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C., said something that best...