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The typically stoic Gary Williams chuckled before recalling the memories.

It was a scene that presented itself only once a year in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the endless lines of students waiting to buy tickets, the packed stands in Cole Field House and the booming noise that filled the former home of the Terrapins men’s basketball team when Duke visited College Park still linger in Williams’ mind.

“It was just incredible,” said Williams, the Terps’ coach from 1989 to 2011, in a phone interview this week. “The students, they were there two or three hours before the game, before the regular warm-ups even. Just the whole thing was a great thing.

“I was lucky to be a part of that and to experience that.”

For Williams, nothing compared to the atmosphere in College Park when the Terps and Blue Devils squared off. But tomorrow, the ACC rivalry that left the iconic sideline general with some of his fondest memories is set to close its final chapter as the Terps visit Duke for the last time as conference foes.

Once the Terps move to the Big Ten this summer, the two programs, which dominated on a national scale and produced some of college basketball’s most entertaining moments in the early 2000s, are likely to end their annual meetings.

But the moments of pride for Williams and countless Terps players and fans remain.

“Maryland-Duke turn of century is [college basketball] at its absolute zenith,” wrote Scott Van Pelt, a university alumnus and ESPN host, in an email yesterday. “[Former Duke guard] Jay Williams has repeatedly told me the biggest rival he had while at Duke was Maryland, not UNC.”

The rivalry dates back to the mid-1920s and picked up in 1953, the first year of the ACC. Though the Blue Devils have traditionally had the upper hand — they lead the series 113-63 — there have been pockets of extremely intense, balanced matchups.

Broadcaster Johnny Holliday, who has been calling Terps games for 35 years, suggested the rivalry reached a “fever pitch” when Duke ousted the Terps in the 2001 Final Four en route to a national title. Or, he backtracked, perhaps when Gary Williams’ team beat the Blue Devils the next year toward the end of the regular season to kick-start its own run to an NCAA Championship.

In the past 20 years, games between the Terps and Blue Devils featured All-Americans such as guards Juan Dixon and J.J. Reddick. The matchups produced moments such as Duke’s 10-point comeback in the final minute to earn a win in 2001 and guard Steve Blake’s steal of Jay Williams at the end of the first half in a 2002 contest at Cole that led to a key Terps regular-season triumph. And bouts between the two teams also generated intense reactions, like Duke’s fans exchanging words with guard Greivis Vasquez and students from this university rioting after the team beat the Blue Devils on Vasquez’s Senior Day in 2010.

And Saturday, the Terps-Blue Devils rivalry might have its final chance to deepen its imprint on the college basketball scene. But there’s already been quite a history.

“There have been some really great, games against Duke, really did a lot for the university,” said Barry Gossett, a longtime Terps fan and significant donor to the Terrapin Club Scholarship Fund. “Those games were about as much fun as the fans had at Maryland.”

JANUARY 28, 1995: TERPS 74, DUKE 72

With his team trailing by two, Duke center Erik Meek shot a turnaround jumper in the waning seconds of a tilt at Cole on Jan. 28, 1995. And when forward Joe Smith swatted that shot away to seal a 74-72 Terps victory, Gary Williams finally got the feeling that his program was ready to compete on the national stage.

And after that game — the Terps’ first victory over the Blue Devils in 15 tries — the annual matchup with Duke took on greater meeting.

“There wasn’t a rivalry unless you had a chance to beat a team and you beat them every once in a while,” Williams said. “It wasn’t a real rivalry until then.”

In his first few years at the helm of the program, Williams didn’t consider the Blue Devils as counterparts. Duke was one of college basketball’s most prominent teams in the early 1990s. The Blue Devils won NCAA Championships in 1991 and 1992 and were constantly on national television.

The Terps, meanwhile, weren’t even allowed to play on national television during Williams’ first three years in College Park. The NCAA left the university with crippling sanctions after uncovering various violations former coach Bob Wade committed while with the Terps.

Banned from reaching a broad audience and ineligible to compete in the NCAA tournament, the Terps suffered in the early 1990s. After the sanctions were lifted in 1992, the Terps showed quick improvement, but it took a win against the vaunted Blues Devils to serve as a spark for the program.

Two years later the Terps finished 12-4 in the ACC and reached the second of seven Sweet 16s under Williams.

“That kind of kick-started things a little bit, being able to be good enough to beat a team like Duke,” Williams said. “You don’t just turn around and win a national championship. You go step by step, and those guys and that group allowed us to feel that someday we could get to that point.”

Smith’s block capped Williams’ first victory over Duke, and the coach admitted that his first taste of beating coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Blue Devils was unique.

“Maryland wants to beat Duke just because they’re so good, just because the fans at Cameron are so nuts,” Holliday said. “Krzyzewski being a great coach, a Hall of Fame coach, there’s always that extra incentive, extra spark of wanting to knock off the big boys.”

FEBRUARY 17, 2002: TERPS 87, DUKE 73

Students stood in the stands behind the benches at Cole. They were always there, and they were always loud, Williams said.

But Feb. 17, 2002 provided a unique atmosphere.

Williams knew how different this game would be as he walked through the tunnel from the locker room to court, where the Terps were preparing for another battle with Duke.

“You could actually feel the noise,” Williams recalled. “It would go right through you.”

There’s a reason the fans were so loud that day. They were there to see what had developed into one of the country’s most intense rivalries, as the No. 3 Terps and the No. 1 Blue Devils squared off for the sixth time in two seasons. And the Terps fans were pining for redemption.

In the 2000-01 season, the two teams played four times, each game producing it’s share of thrilling moments. In College Park, the Terps blew a 10-point lead in the final minute and lost in overtime. Williams’ team beat the Blue Devils in Durham, N.C., on Duke’s Senior Night, but the Blue Devils bested the Terps by two in the ACC tournament.

Then, the two conference rivals met on the sport’s biggest stage in the 2001 Final Four. The Terps took a double-digit first-half lead, but they squandered it to the eventual national champion Blue Devils.

“I think legendary is a word that gets tossed around too much,” Gossett said. “But those games were legendary.”

Forward Lonny Baxter certainly felt the intensity of the rivalry.

“It’s just an all-out war whenever we play them,” Baxter told The Diamondback before the February 2002 matchup at Cole.

But when the teams finally met, there wasn’t as much drama as usual. The Terps contained Jay Williams, and forward Chris Wilcox turned in a 23-point performance.

At the end of the first half, Blake pickpocketed Williams and finished a layup that sent the crowd into hysterics, and the Terps cruised to a convincing 87-73 victory.

“I think in that particular year they said, ‘OK, we blew it last year against Duke. This year, we’re not going to blow it,’” Holliday said. “And they didn’t.”

About a month and a half later, the Terps won their first national championship. Gary Williams credits the victory over Duke in front of the loud Cole crowd as a turning point in the season.

It was a game in which the desire to beat Duke was on display. Students camped out for hours before the gates opened, waiting to buy tickets. They were loud before the game started. And they rioted after the Terps won.

Duke games like that one often led to students staying out in the cold to get tickets, so the university adopted a points system, an organized way to award students tickets rather than have them line up in the elements as is still done today at schools such as Duke and Syracuse.

Williams, though, isn’t a fan of that. He appreciated the students who spent hours outside to reserve their spot in Cole and later Comcast Center.

“If students wanted to wait in line for tickets, they should have every right to,” Williams said. “And I just worried that sometimes we didn’t get our best fans in there because of the way things got set up after a while.”

He added: “They won some games for us. I guarantee you.”

MARCH 3, 2010: TERPS 79, DUKE 72

After the Terps’ title in 2002, the team began to slip out of the national spotlight as they failed to produce dominant teams. They won the 2004 ACC Championship over Duke in an overtime bout that added another thrill to the rivalry’s history, but after that the matchup lost some relevance.

Until a spunky Venezuelan revived it, that is.

Vasquez won the ACC Player of the Year in 2010, and the combination of his play and brash attitude made the Terps — and their rivalry with the Blue Devils — significant again. When Vasquez called Cameron Indoor Stadium his “house” in 2010 and bantered with Duke students, he jolted a lopsided rivalry with intensity.

On the court, though, things weren’t changing. The Terps lost six straight games against Duke entering Vasquez’s Senior Night on March 3, 2010 at Comcast Center. So every time the Terps visited Cameron, Blue Devils’ fans made an effort to point out that the two teams weren’t on equal footing.

The Cameron Crazies chanted “not our rivals” when the Terps came to town, and despite the thrilling bouts of the early 2000s, Holliday felt they were right.

“Duke’s rival is North Carolina,” Holliday said. “It’s not us.”

But the Terps’ fans still lined up hours before games to get their choice of seats in Comcast Center when Duke visited that March night in 2010. And they got everything they could have asked for.

Vasquez had 20 points, five assists and four rebounds that night to lead the Terps to a 79-72 victory. They later went on to share the ACC regular-season title.

“You really can’t ask for a better script than that,” former guard Eric Hayes told The Diamondback.

And as usual, the Terps fans, a majority sporting bright gold T-shirts given out in the student section before the game, played a big role.

As the buzzer sounded, Eric Detweiler, The Diamondback’s men’s basketball beat writer at the time, located Vasquez hoping to study his reaction. But he didn’t get much time to do so.

“All of a sudden, he was completely submerged in yellow and gold,” Detweiler said. “It was pretty much mayhem down the floor.”

The fans stormed the court that night to surround Vasquez. They later rioted on Route 1 in a scene that turned violent. But that, Detweiler said, epitomized how the Terps fans felt about beating Duke.

“Whenever Duke came to town, the campus had a different feel that day from the hours before the game until the game was over,” Detweiler said. “And if they won, even past that.”

Added Gossett: “Sometimes the fans got a little too crazy.”

On the court, the Terps finally proved they could once again compete with Duke. And Vasquez finally got to knock off the Blue Devils.

“He probably got under their skin a little bit,” Holliday said. “He just loved the game and could relate to the fans and would banter back and forth with the fans. For him to win his final game at home and to beat Duke, that was pretty good.”

FEBRUARY 15, 2014: TERPS at DUKE

The Terps haven’t been to the NCAA tournament since Vasquez graduated. Williams retired in 2011, and coach Mark Turgeon has yet to recapture the success of the previous decade, with his team on the verge of another underachieving season.

But Turgeon has still experienced the feeling Williams cherishes so much: the thrill of topping Duke in College Park. In the final matchup between the two teams as ACC opponents in College Park, guard Seth Allen hit two late free throws to send the Terps to a win over the then-No. 2 Blue Devils, 83-81.

The scene in College Park was familiar. Fans lined up hours before the game, rushed onto the court after the final buzzer sounded and the celebration — which included appearances by the Terps players — poured onto Route 1.

“I don’t know if there was any matchup on the ACC schedule that was quite like this,” Detweiler said.

It’s a scene that won’t return to College Park, not in a conference game at least. And the Terps last regular-season ACC crack at the Blue Devils comes tomorrow evening at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where the fans are so crazy and wins are so rare.

“When you go down there you got nobody for you except the group of Maryland fans that somehow was able to get tickets,” Holliday said. “Maybe 25 or 50 people, that was about it.”

A Terps team that has struggled to find consistency this season and has recorded just five ACC road wins in Turgeon’s tenure faces a tall task to compete with the No. 8 Blue Devils. Still, there’s been enough head-turning moments in the rivalry that Williams, Holliday and Gossett aren’t counting the Terps out.

Plus, the Terps are riding a two-game winning streak in the series after guard Dez Wells scored 30 points to lead the Terps to an ACC tournament upset of the Blue Devils in March.

But it’s probably the last chapter in a storied rivalry for the foreseeable future.

The Terps will move to the Big Ten in July, and they’ll forge new rivalries in a new conference, Turgeon said. But he conceded the rivalry with Duke will be tough to match. Sure, the two teams could play in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge one year — Holliday said that “ought to do it” — but the matchup won’t be annual and likely will lose some significance.

“In a perfect world, the ACC would have stayed the same,” Williams said. “This is where it is now, and you got to try to do what’s best for the university.”

But Williams made sure to point out he won’t forget the times his Terps battled Duke.

If there’s anything the retired coach likes to look back on, it’s those memories. He said he immensely enjoys recalling the memories of when his team beat the Blue Devils for the first time after Smith’s block in 1995, earned that convincing victory over Duke in 2001 and topped Krzyzewski’s team on Vasquez’s Senior Day in 2010.

And Williams doesn’t need to watch an annual game between the Terps and Blue Devils to think back upon on those games and the screaming Terps fans that always accompanied Duke to Cole and Comcast Center.

“That’s one of things that you remember,” Williams said. “And it never leaves.”

Senior staff writer Daniel Gallen contributed to this report.