If the paratroopers who dropped into Wallace Wade Stadium at halftime Thursday night had been returning from three years on Comet 67P, they would have looked at all the empty seats and the scoreboard that read UNC 28, Duke 7 and shrugged, “Same old, same old.”

The Tar Heels edited the revisionist history of their last two games with Duke by pounding the ballyhooed and rebuilt Blue Devils into the stadium turf that will be lowered after the season to add more seats to the old horseshoe. Duke might want to wait another year or two to see if the David Cutcliffe love affair is cooling off with the fans who filled the stadium to start the ESPN game, many of whom had fled by halftime.

Meanwhile, Carolina basically took the headlines of the last three years that were pummeling the football program and athletic department and shoved them down the Blue Devils’ throats with a satisfying 45-20 victory that easily could have been worse save three turnovers near the Duke end zone. Nevertheless, it was a night that had to make the Tar Heels in attendance and watching on national TV prouder than they have been in a while.

Duke was no match for the chrome-helmeted callers, who were much faster and much stronger from start to finish. The Blue Devils’ pathetically easy schedule (ranked 101st, with one victory over a winning team) finally caught up with them, and the game looked like it had for the 20 years prior to their narrow victories the last two seasons. Carolina was dominant in every phase of the game and Duke appeared fairly amateurish in its attempts to run, pass and kick the ball.

The beleaguered Tar Heel defense had its finest hour, holding Duke to 20 points, 14 coming in garbage time. The performance underscored how many young players Larry Fedora has been grooming in the shadow of scholarship losses, and it just might have saved the hides of the UNC defensive coaching staff, under heavy fire from fans most of the season. Duke had a paltry 116 yards of rushing (compared to 316 for UNC) and had to abandon its game plan of ball control to keep the pigskin away from Marquise & Company. The Devils threw for 252 years, most of them in trailing desperation.

T.J. Logan joined Marquise Williams, and later added Romar Morris, to a punishing ground attack that (behind a blasting offensive line) hit the holes hard and fast all night. Carolina’s confidence grew as the temperature fell, and by the time the third quarter ended, the UNC mangers were shaking up the cans of spray paint that would cover the reclaimed Victory Bell after 15 more minutes of playing time.

“We finally put a complete game together for four quarters in all three phases,” said Larry Fedora, who notched his first win over Duke in three tries and now needs only to beat second-rate N.C. State next Saturday to finish the regular season at 7-5 and take his team to a pretty decent bowl. Winning there and going 8-5 might garner a few ACC Coach of the Year Votes for what The Hat has brought his young team through, on and off the field, in his third season on The Hill.

Williams, who ran for two touchdowns and threw for a pair to set the UNC single-season total offense record, has to give Florida State’s Jameis Winston some competition for All-ACC quarterback. The red-shirt junior has grown before our eyes into a spectacular football player whose only foibles come when he tries to do too much. Three times he lost the ball while stretching or escaping on the doorstep of more touchdowns.

And who is coming back next season with Williams? Pretty much everybody: 10 starters on offense, 8 or 9 on defense plus, finally, a full recruiting class of 25 signees. This could be the program we’ve all been waiting for, rising like Mount Vesuvius from the scandalous ashes of a few bad apples that long ago were thrown out of the barrel.

The statistics are there – 592 yards of total offense, 45 points and touchdowns by five different players (Marquise, Quinshad, Logan, Hollins and safety Tim Scott with a fumble forced by Nazir Jones). But this wasn’t a stat game, it was a STATEMENT game. Duke has done a terrific job resurrecting its program and becoming relevant again in football through improved talent and smart scheduling, but victories by five total points over the last two years somehow convinced many people that the Blue Devils had passed Carolina in the oblong sport. Not so fast, as ESPN’s Lee Corso likes to say.

Thursday night, under the lights on the national tube, proved that to be a fallacy. And with Duke losing inarguably its three best players – quarterback Anthony Boone, receiver-returner Jamison Crowder and linebacker David Helton – the rivalry and the Victory Bell may be moving down 15-501 South for the foreseeable future.