Duke and UNC often make history. Saturday’s game will for reasons other than basketball.

Each of the games between Duke and North Carolina each year carries with it a sense of the passing of time, the changing of the seasons. The first always marks the unofficial midway point of the ACC season. The second is often the denouement, the grand conclusion, the finale when the fuses are lit on whatever fireworks happen to be left.

That’s not so much the case Saturday, with the stakes again not quite as high as they usually are for either team -- their NCAA tournament fates will be decided, inevitably, in Greensboro -- but there’s still a sense of momentousness to this game for reasons that transcend those that usually surround the rivalry.

From an empty Cameron to a lightly occupied Smith Center, we’re marking another notch on an upward trajectory, a step closer back to normalcy. A year after everything fell apart, it’s slowly coming back together, and playing this game in front of 2,400 students is 2,400 more than were able to see North Carolina’s win at Duke last month.

We’ll almost certainly look back at this chapter of the rivalry as the last played under pandemic conditions, or the conditions of this pandemic anyway. It will become the kind of curio historians will look back and ponder years from now, the way we have just looked back at the football season during the 1918 influenza pandemic or the 1960 game that was the last, before February, when both teams were unranked. (They still are).

We have reached the beginning of the end, in a good way.

This is one of the last ACC basketball games that will be played on someone’s home court without the roar, without the seats full, without the atmosphere that made the game great. By next fall, as more and more people are vaccinated, as more restrictions are lifted, these circumstances will recede into memory. This game will be, as it so often becomes for other reasons, a bookmark in history, a place to turn when we want to remember what it was like. This is that one last game under COVID’s spell, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

“It would be great to get back to the old days and have fans and have summer and have 31 games or so, do all those things, that’s my hope,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “But the game is big. There’s no question about it. We don’t minimize it in any way.”

The ACC tournament is going to be weird, too, make no mistake of that, but it will actually be a step forward from the utter weirdness of last year, when they conducted baby races on the dirty floor as a pandemic loomed overhead like a funnel cloud, when fans leaving on Wednesday night weren’t even told they wouldn’t be allowed back Thursday, when Florida State was pulled off the floor during warmups, suddenly champions in a newly uncertain world.

After last year, being back in Greensboro with a few thousand fans in the building is actually going to feel like some semblance of normalcy. And is that really any different than the non-pandemic crowd for Pittsburgh and Boston College at 10:15 p.m. on Tuesday? Not by much.

The idea of a Duke-Carolina game played in an empty or near-empty building still does jar the senses like a concussive blow, and Saturday is still going to be odd. Less odd than it was at Duke, but still so different from everything that we’ve come to expect.

The basketball measured up in the first meeting, against all odds really, coming down to the final possession, North Carolina’s Caleb Love in particular rising to the occasion. There’s no reason not to expect that again, especially with both teams fighting for their NCAA tournament lives.

The game itself may indeed be unforgettable. It often is. But the scene will be, unquestionably. The circumstances surrounding the game will, in future years, be a relic of the way we once had to live and what it looked like when we got to the finish line, or close to it. This will be one of the last ACC games played under these conditions.

“Everybody was glad to see 2020 leave,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “I’m ready to get back to a regular basketball season in 2021.”

We all are. We’re close. The end is near. This game is yet again a milepost, memorable for that, no matter what happens on the court.

Duke at North Carolina

When: 6 p.m., Saturday

Where: Smith Center, Chapel Hill

Watch: ESPN