PHILADELPHIA — They have met 256 times. They have met in the regular season and the ACC Tournament. They used to meet all the time in the ole in-season “Big Four” Tournament in which the two of them would get together with Wake Forest and NC State for a holiday preview of the ACC season to come.

Once, they actually met in the semifinals of the NIT, back in 1971.

But Duke and North Carolina have never before met in the NCAA Tournament. Until now.

College basketball’s deepest blood feud will find its next revival in prime time Saturday night in the Big Easy. If there is one consolation prize for Carolina’s 69-49 vanquishing of Saint Peter’s Sunday, that was it.

Duke-Carolina at the Final Four?

Yes, please.

“It will be an interesting week,” Tar Heels coach Hubert Davis said, and even for an understated man like Davis that was an historic understatement.

North Carolina leads the series 142-115. The Tar Heels won the first-ever game between the two rivals 36-25 on Jan. 24, 1920, when Duke was still known as Trinity College.

More famously, Carolina also won the most recent meeting, at Cameron Indoor Stadium on March 5, its 94-81 an epic buzzkill on the night Mike Krzyzewski coached his final home game for Blue Devils.

That will be the most consuming of many storylines that will consume this game: Krzyzewski’s quest to win a sixth national championship in his final year as a coach. Davis will be attempting to win a title in his first.

Following that game in Durham there was a ruckus because one Duke assistant coach refused to shake Davis’ hand and another did a blow-by; it’s just the most recent droplet of bad blood in a rivalry that has featured much of it, including a near-riot started by a fistfight between Carolina’s Larry Brown and Duke’s Art Heyman in 1961.

One matter of local interest will be the squaring off of North Carolina’s R.J. Davis and Duke’s AJ Griffin, who were teammates in high school at Archbishop Stepinac in White Plains.