This will be a Thursday night unlike most others in our area.

At 8 p.m. today, Florida State University and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels will kick off a football game in UNC's Kenan Stadium -- the first-ever Thursday night college game in Chapel Hill.

It will be a moment of rare national exposure for Butch Davis's team, striving for a win that would galvanize a season. And for UNC and Chapel Hill citizens, it means an evening of dodging traffic jams and congestion that could be monumental.

Most will take it in stride. Some will understandably be more than a little put out by this upheaval at the end of a workday.

We confess to being essentially traditionalists who tend to long nostalgically for a simpler time when college football meant one thing: autumn Saturday afternoons. And while recognizing the reality of modern intercollegiate football, we fondly if dimly remember a time when games were a campus highlight ending a week when classes might have ended just hours, if not moments, before the first ball was snapped.

Yes, those days probably never were as we picture them. As Will Rogers was fond of saying, things aren't like they used to be -- and they never were.

Whatever the case, college football today is a titanic spectacle and a prodigious television draw. Thus the institution first of Saturday night games and then, more recently, Thursday night games thrusting one featured contest a week into the prime-time limelight.

UNC has long resisted the temptation to enter that Thursday night spotlight. But this year, the opportunity to host the game while students were on fall break, minimizing the disruption, proved a winning bid.

Still, the campus will feel the effect. Most workers will be sent home early, with offices closing at 3 p.m. so evening commuters can flee before early tailgaters begin flooding the parking areas around Kenan Stadium.

For most in Tar Heel nation, the disruption will be a small price to pay for a few hours on national television with no other college game competing for attention. It's an historic moment, and we confess a win over traditionally powerful but struggling FSU would be a fitting capstone to the night.