LIU's task: Beat Carolina -- in Carolina

No respect? Long Island University won 27 of 32 games this season, is carrying the nation's longest winning streak -- 13 -- and automatically qualified for the NCAA Tournament with its Northeast Conference championship last week.

Yet it was rewarded -- if that's the right word -- with a No. 15 seed and an opening game Friday night against five-time national champion North Carolina, ranked No. 7 in the country.

"Did we win 10 games this year or what?" LIU coach Jim Ferry marveled this week. "Holy smokes. I thought our body of work should've gotten us a higher seed. And it's not just that it's North Carolina. It's North Carolina in Carolina."

The game is in Charlotte, an easy 118-mile commute from the Tar Heels' campus in Chapel Hill. "It'll be similar to playing Northwestern in Evanston this year," Ferry said. "Everybody wearing purple for miles around." (This time: Carolina blue.)

"I think," Ferry said, "I'll give Roy a call and see if he wants to move this to Brooklyn."

Ferry acknowledged he didn't "imagine North Carolina's kids spent a lot of time trying to figure out who Jason Brickman is, our 5-10 freshman point guard." But still, the deference shown North Carolina in the tournament seeding is a reminder of college basketball's pecking order. LIU once was a major player in the sport's New York heyday -- think 1940s and 1950s -- but it had been down too long for the NCAA poobahs to remember.

LIU history professor Joe Dorinson remembers.

"I've watched Blackbird basketball since 1949," Dorinson said in an e-mail. "First as a young fan, enamored of the quintet that featured Sherman White as arguably the best player in the metropolitan area, not to mention the country.

"Later, as a professor at LIU since 1966, I have witnessed many games and many coaches, including Roy Rubin, Ron Smalls, Paul Lizzo, Ray Haskins [a favorite], Ray Martin [the best dressed] and Jim Ferry, who ranks among the best. Coach Ferry is a class act."

Also, Ferry, 43, is a tough customer -- the son of a New York City transit cop, a former all-Nassau County player for Valley Stream North, the leading scorer at Keene State (N.H.) College in his junior year.

In his second head-coaching job, Ferry won 82 games in three years at Adelphi, including a 29-0 regular season 10 years ago that made his team the only one -- among 992 schools playing in all NCAA divisions that season -- to go unbeaten. (Adelphi lost in the Division II semifinals.)

When he left Adelphi for LIU in 2002, Ferry said, coaching colleagues told him he was making a mistake, that he couldn't win at the Brooklyn campus. The team's status was so low he quickly learned "none of the local kids wanted to come," so he scrambled for recruits in unlikely burgs in Texas, Maryland and Canada.

This year, the only New Yorker on the Blackbirds' roster is sophomore reserve Booker Hucks of Bay Shore. But the word is spreading, Ferry said, "and now I'm selling Brooklyn." And he's working on the respect part.