WATCH: Jay Bilas shares some of his most memorable moments from Duke-UNC basketball rivalry

ESPN’s Jay Bilas is one of the most respected names in all of college basketball. He’s got an extensive amount of experience in the sport, both during his playing days with the Duke Blue Devils, his brief stint as a college coach, and then during his broadcasting career with ESPN since 1995. On Saturday night, just before the nation’s most heated college basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina, Bilas shared some of his most memorable moments of the rivalry on Twitter.

You can listen to his audio below or read the transcribed version below the audio clip.

These are some of my most memorable @DukeMBB vs @UNC_Basketball games throughout my career… pic.twitter.com/Npd6pRtL4y

— Jay Bilas (@JayBilas) March 4, 2023

Jay Bilas shares memorable moments from Duke-UNC

“People always ask what my favorite memory is of the Duke-Carolina rivalry, when I was a player, which is hard to remember back when all the games were black and white it seems like. But my team played in the first game in the Dean Dome in January of 1986. It was supposed to open at the beginning that year, but Duke was 16-0 and North Carolina was 17-0. And that we’d never played in a building this big. You know, seats over 20,000. And we walked out on the floor and looked up and it was loaded. I mean, to have the number one versus number three in that kind of nationally televised game was a big deal at that time,” Bilas said.

“And I remember one of my teammates saying, damn, this is nice. We’ve got to get us one of these. (Laughs). Cameron is great. And then, the best memory was probably the ACC Tournament in 1984. We wound up beating North Carolina in the semifinals. And Carolina had an unbelievable team. They were number one. They had Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Brad Daugherty, Kenny Smith, Joe Wolf, Steve Hale. It was a ridiculous team. We wound up winning that game. So that was a very fun locker room afterwards,” Bilas said.

“But the best game I ever broadcast, there were too many of them really to remember. But the one I remember most was maybe in 1998, when Antawn Jamison was still here. And before the game, I had said he was the quickest player I had ever seen from the catch to the release of the shot. And I had mentioned that I had talked about that. And then we put a stopwatch on it for everything but inbounds and free throws. And he had 35 points, 11 rebounds, and had the ball in his hands for only 53 seconds. And it was one of the most illuminating stats on a player that I can ever remember. It was pretty cool,” Bilas said.

This weekend’s meeting between Duke and Carolina is the 260th meeting between the two rivals. It’s the 38th time they have played in the Dean Smith Center. The Blue Devils have won two of their last three trips to the Dean Dome. The game started at 6:30 PM EST and is being nationally televised on ESPN. North Carolina is in desperate need of a victory, as they need a win to keep their slim 2023 NCAA Tournament hopes alive.