RALEIGH — N.C. State needed a drama-free game on Thursday night and Northeastern willingly played its role in a 88-59 win for the Wolfpack.

Playing for the third time in six days, and 48 hours after a dramatic last-second win over St. Bonaventure, the Wolfpack dominated the Huskies early and got a chance to stretch its legs in the second half.

NEW YORK -- It wasn't an historic game for Duke at Madison Square Garden. It may not prove to be all that memorable, either.

The seventh-ranked Blue Devils squandered much of a big second-half lead Saturday but held on in the end to top the unranked Washington Huskies 86-80 in the Carquest Auto Parts Classic. Not exactly a clunker, but the play often was ragged for both teams, although smoother for both in the second half.

Jason McGeorge knows the Cap Eight 4-A conference very, very well. He learned it under former Leesville Road coach David Green as an assistant coach for three years.

In those days he coached against good Broughton teams before watching Wake Forest-Rolesville rise to the top of the league.

Now, in his first head coaching position at Heritage, McGeorge knows his Huskies will face a lot of challenges this season. The Huskies’ regular season ends with consecutive games against Millbrook, Broughton, Leesville Road and Wakefield – all teams that reached the playoffs last year.

“We get to run through at gauntlet and this league has a lot of great coaches,” he said. “The schemes will change. Everybody does something a little different. What we will tell our kids is if we continue to get better we can win a game or two this year.

updated 5:38 p.m.

CHARLOTTE -- All year long in practice, North Carolina has worked on “must-stop” possessions -- meaning it “must stop” an opponent right then and there in order to win the game.

Sunday at Time Warner Cable Arena, the second-seeded Tar Heels did stop (or at least stymie) No. 7 seed Washington over the last seven minutes, morphing into the solid defensive team that coach Roy Williams has said all season they could be.

As a result of its down-to-the-wire 86-83 victory, UNC (28-7) will play either No. 3 seed Syracuse or No. 11 seed Marquette on Friday in the NCAA Sweet 16, an accomplishment that seemed awful far-fetched a year ago, when the Tar Heels didn’t make the NCAA field at all. The trip to Newark with mark UNC’s record 24th appearance regional semi-finals.

The kick sails through the uprights and an entire state goes bananas.

The UConn Huskies, a Division I team for about a decade, had somehow found its way to a BCS bowl, the pinnacle of college football.

All is right in the world, right, Husky fans?

Not so fast.

The most sobering part of UConn's unexpected berth in the January 1 Fiesta Bowl should be its odds of winning - pretty slim, given it is a 17-point underdog against perennial power Oklahoma.

But it looks like the bowl experience will be a financial albatross for UConn, a public university that, like many, has faced financial struggles in recent years thanks to the weak economy.

Welcome to big-time college athletics, where gridiron glory and financial prosperity don't always match up.

As the New Haven Register reports, the University of Connecticut stands to lose money on the deal, even with a guaranteed $2.5 million payment for making the bowl game.

The main culprits here are geography, ticket sales, and perhaps, a fan base reluctant to travel across the country to watch a game that may get out of hand quickly.

Universities headed to bowl games are routinely obligated to buy large chunks of game tickets and hotel rooms. In UConn's case, it is on the hook for 17,500 game tickets - of which it has sold about 4,000 so far - and 550 hotel rooms.

It's a long way from Storrs, CT to Phoenix. The weather's better, for sure, but the airline tickets are costly.

So ticket sales lag.

And the university's expenses are many. Factor in the cost of transporting a team, cheerleaders, band, administrators and the like all the way across the country, and you've got problems.

In North Carolina, the local teams are in better situations.

N.C. State takes on West Virginia in the Champs Sports Bowl Dec. 28. Tickets are selling briskly and campus officials expect to sell all 13,500 they were alloted.

And UNC has already sold all 10,000 of its tickets for the Dec. 30 Music City Bowl against Tennessee.

Here's another financial football sob story: The University of Nevada, which cost itself a cool million bucks by upsetting Boise State in the last game of the regular season. Yes, this is another case of a team costing itself a bunch of money by succeeding on the field.

Try to follow along:

Boise State was the nation's darling all season long, David to the many Goliaths from major football conferences like the SEC.

Undefeated heading into its final game against Nevada, it needed only to win to make a BCS bowl and snare $10 million that would be shared among the rest of the teams in the Western Athletic Conference.

Teams like Nevada.

But Nevada pulled the upset, jettisoning Boise State from a BCS bowl and with it, losing the estimated $1 million it would have netted simply by being in the same conference as a team having a great season.

Whoops.

Heritage soccer coach Scott Sloan doesn’t like to use inexperience as an excuse, but he couldn’t resist mentioning it during his team’s 5-1 loss to Leesville Road on Wednesday night.

After Pride forward Fernando Castellanos outmuscled Heritage defender Matt Sattler in the air to head in the Pride’s final goal, Sloan summed up the Huskies’ plight perfectly.

“That’s just a difference of 15 to 20 pounds,” Sloan said to Sattler. “That’s all that is.”