The game that would never end finally came to a conclusion as Anthony Morrow’s follow of a Georgia Tech teammate’s missed free throw bounced on the rim and fell away. Wake Forest was the team left standing, surviving with a 114-112 double overtime victory in the first round of the ACC Tournament. “I was just hoping to get it over before ‘Sermonette,’” Wake coach Skip Prosser said.

The win by the 11^th-seed Demon Deacons capped the most upset-filled day in tournament history, appropriately enough with a game that saw the most points ever scored by two teams, or by one team. The previous records were held by Maryland and N.C. State. They played to three overtimes in the 1978 quarterfinals, combining for 217 points as the Terps escaped with a 109-108 win.

No other ACC Tournament opened with the lower seeds winning all four games. No other tournament had opened with the lower seeds winning the first three games, either.

If, after the events of the first round, this basketball thing doesn’t catch on with fans in Florida, it never will.

Wake evened its record in two respects by defeating Georgia Tech, the sixth seed, in a game that saw 20 ties and 19 lead changes. The Deacs are now 15-15 on the season, and 6-6 in ACC Tournament overtimes, their most recent victory coming in the 1995 finals against North Carolina.

There’s no point in trying to recap the ebb and flow of events in a contest played in an arena that had mostly emptied by halftime. As the second half began, the game had all the electricity of a power outage, the building so quiet every voice could be heard on the court. But as matters wound to their apparent conclusion, Thaddeus Young got hot for the Jackets, scoring 11 straight points for his team during one stretch. He finished with 30, fifth-most by a Georgia Tech player in an ACC Tournament game.

Anthony Morrow added 20 points for the Jackets, including a 3-pointer to tie the score at 99-all to force the second overtime. Yet even that performance paled in comparison with that of Wake’s Harvey Hale, who scored 21 of his team-high 22 points in the extra 10 minutes of play. The sophomore’s 3-pointer with 26.2 seconds was Wake’s final, decisive basket.

“When you’re playing in that atmosphere you don’t realize what’s going on, you’re just playing the game that you love,” Hale said.

So, they, we, get to do this all again tomorrow. Or, rather, later today.