By 2000, the DBR was incorporated as a North Carolina company, and, having struck a deal with Sports University Advertising, had made enough money to cover costs. The Internet bubble was bursting, but the DBR was just getting started. "The day after we beat Carolina or something, we could get over two-million hits," says Armstrong. "But hourly, the traffic really fluctuates. You look at it when we're playing a game, and there's nothing. Zero. It's like the machine is down."

Given the constant growth of the Internet, it's impossible to put a number on the fan sites populating the Web. A recent Google search produced thirteen devoted to Duke, two of which are fee-charging sites ("Devils Illustrated" and "The Devils Den") owned by companies that specialize in running college fan sites. Rivals.com, a company based in Brentwood, Tennessee, runs ninety-two college fan sites nationwide, from BamaOnLine to GoWyoGo.com. The Seattle-based TheInsiders.com, the recruiting fanatic's dream site, operates 133, as well as high-school sites in fourteen states.

Fan sites are probably best known for getting people in a lot of trouble. In the spring of 2003, tigerboard.com, a Missouri fan site, posted photos of Iowa State University's basketball coach Larry Eustachy kissing female students at an off-campus party. This, Iowa State officials ruled, was not the offense they hired him for. Days later, Eustachy resigned. Around the same time, autigers.com, an Auburn University fan site, was flooded with posts about sightings of University of Alabama head football coach Mike Price at a Pensacola, Florida, strip club. Given the source, Alabama fans had good reason to ignore this--until it was circulating conference-wide. Local papers picked it up, and Price was gone within weeks. In the winter of 2003, news of player dissatisfaction with UNC head basketball coach Matt Doherty first appeared on insidecarolina.com, a Tar Heel fan site. Roy Williams has since replaced him.

According to Sports Illustrated, whose reporters monitor fan sites to fish for leads, rare is the big-time school generating fewer than three unofficial sites. "Unofficial," meaning that, like the DBR, they are in no way affiliated with or endorsed by the school, and so their operators aren't subject to such NCAA restrictions as talking to recruits--which, unlike the DBR, many do. "Julian stayed out of that," says Steve Politi, a sports writer with The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, and former Duke beat reporter with The News & Observer. "He's a fan--a very well-connected one--but a fan. So many times I run into these 'reporters' from 'ilovethewildcats.com' or some other bogus site grilling kids with questions like, 'What you think about Tubby [Smith, University of Kentucky men's basketball coach]?' or 'When you gonna make a visit?' They've really blurred the line between unbiased media and fan. That's one thing I really admire about the guys at the DBR. They haven't turned it into a profession. It's just their passion."

Still, says Politi, the DBR altered the media landscape. "Julian's site was one of the first in the country to have an influence on how beat writers did their reporting. This was 1996, remember, back when the Internet was in its infancy. It gave people this instant access to Duke news. I stumbled upon it one day and came back to it several times a day. I can't tell you how many times I had an edge on the technophobic competition because of things those guys unearthed."

Will Blythe, author and longtime literary editor at Esquire, is a Chapel Hill native and UNC graduate. He's currently working on a book about the Duke-UNC rivalry. To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever is due out from HarperCollins next spring. "I've been reading it for a Duke perspective on basketball and all things Carolina," he says. A lifelong Tar Heel fan, Blythe says he was amazed by the degree of civility he encountered on the DBR. "I didn't feel like I was slipping behind enemy lines at all." When he e-mailed the DBR one day looking for Duke partisans to interview for his book, he recalls, Hemmerich promptly responded. "He kindly collected for me a vast array of anti-Carolina jokes."

Sometimes, though, even the DBR messes up. "Those guys are great," says Jay Bilas '86, J.D. '92, an ESPN commentator and former starting forward with the Blue Devils, referring to Hemmerich and King. "But on any message board, you could say something that's misleading. You can't really judge tone, and since very few posters use their real names, you don't know if the person's credible at all. So while people may just think it's folks talking to each other, it's more like going on public radio. And I think you have the obligation to be accurate."

Now and then, Bilas says, he'll visit and, if he needs to, correct the record. "When people see something in print, they more readily believe it. And if it's wrong or improperly attributed, that can be dangerous. You say it in the barbershop, and it floats off in the air. But when you write it on a site, it tends to have more of a shelf life."

"It's a challenge," says Jason Evans '89, senior executive producer with CNN. "There are a lot of folks, including myself, on the DBR who trace their Duke fandom back to being insane fans when they were at Duke. We have a certain reputation as Cameron Crazies, being really creative, really passionate, and that's why the Crazies are the standard by which every single other group of fans are measuring themselves. And so here you have sort of the post-Crazy community on the DBR. I'd like to think that we try to do the same thing again on the Internet. We try to be just as intelligent and creative. We try not to be crude. And we don't succeed all the time. But it'd be really great if we could be known as the best fans on the Internet. And you know, some of us are really trying to do that."

Evans describes himself as "probably the number one most frequent poster of all time on the DBR." Nobody denies this. The DBR has two bulletin boards, one for basketball and one for everything else. And, among the variously titled threads on either, you can almost always find him--taking issue with a newspaper article's flawed game reporting or deconstructing the latest Survivor, which he watches religiously: "First of all, NYC Crazie, you're dead on for questioning why Shii Ann and Kathy went along with this. Rob spoke to Lex about protecting Lex. He said nothing to Shii Ann and Kathy. Who else do they think is going to get voted off?"

"A lot of us have become friends without ever having seen each other," he says. "There are probably twenty-plus people in the world who, if you said to me, 'Do you know that person?' I'd say, 'Yeah, of course,' even though I've never heard their voice or seen their face in my life. But I could tell you their marital status, how many kids they have, their career, their political leanings.

"Before the ACC tournament two years ago, I told probably a dozen people, 'Hey, if you have a hotel problem or something, you can sleep at my house.' My wife got a little upset. She said, 'You don't know these people at all.' And I said, 'Yes I do.' And she said, 'You've never met them.' And I said, 'Yes, but I promise, I know them very, very well.'"