Luke Winn, SI.com

That all these players are white may be no coincidence. Duke has had a host of African-American stars in the same stretch -- Grant Hill, Carlos Boozer, Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Jay Williams and, currently, Shelden Williams -- but none endured the level of harassment to qualify them as true Hated Dukies. A white Blue Devils star -- even if his socio-economic background is not as lofty as his average classmate's -- is more easily associated with the school's overall (and 64 percent white) student body, and especially the despised Cameron Crazies, Duke's rowdy (and again, predominantly white) student section, which is merciless to visiting opponents. Duke hatred and Duke envy, after all, run deeper than basketball. It involves conflicts of class and culture, pitting private-school haughtiness against state-school pride, and the Blue Devils' Caucasian hoopsters serve as the lightning rods.

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Don't expect the hate-storm to end once Redick leaves. He's already identified an heir: freshman point guard Greg Paulus, who in this year's McDonald's All-America Game displayed prime Hated Dukie attributes by proving to be both talented and cocksure. "I let Greg know [this summer] that people are really going to dislike him, because he's got a little bit of moxie," Redick said. "And he knows it's going to happen. The great thing about Greg is that I think he knows he rubs some people the wrong way."

Before passing the torch, however, Redick will have to run the ACC gauntlet one last time -- with the added bull's-eye of being a Wooden Award candidate on the nation's preseason No. 1 team. Outsiders who fail to comprehend the level of energy devoted to Duke-hating should consider the following quote from a September 2005 edition of The Diamondback, the University of Maryland's student paper. An anti-war protester, reacting to his fellow students' political apathy and low turnout at a rally more than a month before the first basketball game, said: "We have all this spirit -- we hate Duke so much. If we turn that hatred from J.J. Redick to something important, we could actually make something happen."

Approximately 50 UM students trekked to D.C.'s National Mall for that anti-war rally. When Redick returns to Maryland on Feb. 11, for his final appearance at the school that provided him an eye-opening welcome to life as a Hated Dukie, 4,000 students will hit him with every insult in the book. In the ACC, that's considered activism at its finest.