Sideline Cut: In the small hours of Friday morning, a sporting miracle occurred. The Duke University basketball team, simultaneously the most loved and loathed hoops team in America, got booted out of the March Madness college basketball championship.

Americans revere college sports for the same basic reason many Irish sports fans cherish Gaelic Games. Playing for playing's sake - and not for money - lies at their soul. Although college football and basketball are in essence big business, they retain something of the innocence and uncomplicated honour of sport by virtue of the fact the players are amateurs.

For the best players, college or NCAA sports are undeniably a springboard to professionalism. The finest college ball-players in America are full-time athletes showcasing their games for eagle-eyed NBA scouts. Many are students only in the loosest sense, "majoring in communications" for a couple of seasons before vaulting into the promised land of the NBA, where it is all diamonds and pearls and, in many cases, a fast track out of the ghetto for families.

College basketball has been hit with its fair share of scandals down the decades, and the recruitment process favours the big, rich colleges. However, during the epic knockout tournament that dominates March, it manages to transcend its faults and shortcomings to become a magical and compelling event in which joy and heartbreak, the most elemental sporting emotions, are always to the fore.

A tiny percentage of the men playing in front of packed houses around America will, of course, feature in NBA teams next year.

But for the vast majority, this is the pinnacle of a sporting career that, while great and blessed, will fall just that little bit shy of greatness. After the thrills and romance of the NCAA tournament, they graduate and fall back into the crowd, remembered only by a few.

Duke University is unrivalled when it comes to perpetuating the memory of its basketball alumni. Duke stands for privilege, it stands for education, it stands for respect, for family values and for success. For those reasons and others, many people include their absolute detestation of Duke as being a central tenet of their personalities. Even John Edwards, the North Carolina senator who was a presidential candidate last time out, admitted to a reporter he "hated" Duke basketball. Hate is not a word politicians are advised to use.

But Duke people have that polite but slightly pouting sense of rank and privilege that makes many gnash their teeth. The men's basketball team have become Duke's rallying tool and the most public manifestation of its values and ideals. Along with North Carolina - the schools are just a few miles apart on the famous Tobacco Road in Durham and Raleigh - Duke have won three NCAA championships.

The coach, Mike Kryzyzewski (pronounced She-Chef-Ski, but generally shortened to Coach K), is a legend. He turned down a reputed $50 million to coach the Los Angeles Lakers, a big coup for the authenticity and appeal of college sports. He is a highly sought-after corporate speaker and a Republican lobbyist. Of immigrant stock, he is the American dream.

At the Sweet Sixteen game against Louisiana State, Coach K's daughter sat in the stands with her husband, who had flown from his posting in Iraq to attend Duke's drive for glory. Duke fans are called the Cameron Crazies. They are, predominantly, young Americans who look like they have stepped from the set of The OC or Dawson's Creek or one of those preppy, psychobabble US prime-time dramas. They paint their faces blue and cheer wildly and smile in a radiant, wholesome way that leaves the millions of blue-collar Americans in no doubt that soon these happy kids will be running the country.

Duke is full of gothic buildings and willowy rivers. But it is a pastiche of traditional educational strongholds, founded in 1924 by the tobacco magnate James B Duke, who aspired to have a premier collegiate establishment, "a Harvard of the south", built in his honour.

Duke haters love the fact graduate Richard Nixon famously remarked that "whatever I have done or may do in the future, Duke University is responsible in one way or another".

It spices up the delicious myth that for all the perfect smiles and sense of nobility - Duke basketball men make a point of helping opponents up when they hit the floor - Duke is somehow sinister and unfair.

Just this month, a North Carolina hoops fan/Duke hater named Will Blythe publishes a book entitled To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever.

Last year, I was lucky enough to see Duke play a regular season game against St John's in Madison Square Garden in New York.

It was a noon tip-off on a February Saturday and a group of us turned up after a late night. The basketball was terrific and a huge crowd showed up, in chief to see Duke and their shooting sensation, JJ Redick. But even with our bleary eyes, we could pick out the Duke alumni in the crowd - well-ironed, insultingly healthy and absolutely content in the knowledge that they were here to see their darling Blue Devils win. As ever.

They looked like they had just enjoyed a light brunch somewhere exclusive and would be heading off to an equally opulent tennis club in the afternoon. As a friend from Donegal who has been living in the States for a number of years observed: "Those Duke effers are a quare pain in the arse, aren't they." Duke won.

After midnight on Thursday night, I tuned in to see them inflict their God-given mix of handsomeness and Dukeyness on the poor suckers from Louisiana State. Duke were the number one seeds for this year's NCAA championship and this year's crop was particularly gilded. Uniquely among division one college sides, Duke started three white players, including a freshman named Greg Paulus, a tough little point guard who could also have played quarterback for most college teams.

When Coach K recruits you, though, you don't say no.

All eyes, however, were on Redick. For four years, JJ Redick has been the darling of basketball traditionalists. He is a pure shooter, an absolutely unstoppable distance jump-shooter who this year became Duke's and the Atlantic Coast Conference's all-time scorer. He also possesses that blend of angelic good looks and a tough, can do attitude that achieving America loves. That makes him a hot commodity and something rather exotic for the NBA, where the game has been reduced to above-the-rim athleticism and power plays.

A bone fide jump-shooting star, a throwback to 1970s basketball, would go down a dream.

Redick is a sensational player at college level. But against Louisiana, tall and fabulously athletic and black, his limitations were finally exposed. He was hounded and haunted by the 6ft 5in Garret Temple, who was quicker and stronger. Redick averaged 27 points a game, but as Duke fell in the last minute, he was retired having made just three of 18 shots.

Red-eyed, frustrated and beaten, he walked to the bench to hear for the last time the adoring cheers of the Blue Devils faithful. Redick will undoubtedly be drafted - he will bring customers into NBA arenas - but whether he has the muscle to survive in the big bad world is the big question.

For all the Duke haters out there, the important thing was that this March will not end with JJ and the other knights of Duke basketball cutting down the nets after another national championship. The realm is safe, for another year anyway.