Thursday night's UNC-Virginia Tech game was, I suspect no one can dispute, a thriller.

The Tar Heels scored their first victory against Virginia Tech since that school entered the ACC, and their first conference victory of this season. It was an enormous upset by UNC over the 14th-ranked Hokies.

The stadium was full and uncounted millions watched on national TV as ESPN telecast the game across the country. It was a big payday for the teams.

It was college football, circa 2009.

And what a long way we have come in just a generation.

Like any fan, I reveled in Thursday night's late-game fumble and then time-expiring field goal. It was an exciting, tension-filled game. It was a breakthrough moment, perhaps, for UNC.

But I couldn't help but reflect on an article I'd read just days before from The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was by Michael Oriard, a former college and professional football player now a professor of English and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University.

The article was adapted from his upcoming book, "Bowled Over: Big-Time Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era," which will be published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.

What has happened, of course, is what used to be a Saturday-afternoon collegiate experience is now a huge sports-entertainment behemoth. Every school, even the best -- and UNC and Duke are clearly among the best -- struggles to balance the role of major-sport intercollegiate athletics and the educational mission of their universities.

Oriard's essay makes some provocative points. He deals, among other topics, with the racial revolution in college sports in the late 1960s. He recalls that period: "Black players called their coaches racist and boycotted practice. White players at the University of Maryland forced their coach out for demeaning them. Coaches everywhere were forced to adjust to the special needs of their African American athletes and, by extension, all their athletes."

By and large, we have gone well beyond the racial polarization of the playing fields in those days.

But other issues, revolving around the place of big-time sports in an academic setting, remain.

Writes Oriard:

"At some point, many followers of college football awakened to a realization that the game had changed in basic ways. The simplest measure of the transformation would be the huge salaries that became the norm for coaches in the top programs in the 1990s, three times as much as just decade earlier, and many, many times the $20,000 or $25,000 salaries of the 1960s."

The realities of modern major-college participation in major sports are quite apparent. There is the arms race of stadium and facility construction; the pressure to recruit kids not just in high school but now in even lower grades; the pressure on coaches to win at any cost.

We are fortunate here in Durham and Chapel Hill. Our top-ranked teams in the revenue sports -- football and basketball -- are well-coached and by all accounts as clean as they come in today's college sports landscape. In basketball, especially, the Heels and the Blue Devils manage to excel while reflecting well on the academically outstanding universities they represent.

Still, however insulated we may be, our favorite teams inexorably are caught up in the frenzy that ends football games after 11 p.m. on what quaintly used to be thought of as a "school night" to satisfy the voracious appetite of television.

Oriard, who understands, participated in and worries about the sports as a threat to colleges, sizes up the challenge nicely.

"Big-time college football was an integral part of American higher education as it developed, not something tacked on. And it follows that radically changing -- let alone abandoning -- high-pressure, highly commercialized big-time football might have serious consequences."

But as the economics of the college athletic picture changes, as television revenue faces a potential ceiling even as expenses continue spiraling upward, we have to wonder: Is the current environment sustainable?

It is a question worthy of serious thought, even as we revel in the improving fortunes of our football teams and eagerly await the opening of basketball season.

Bob Ashley is editor of The Herald-Sun. Contact him at (919) 419-6678 or by e-mail at bashley@heraldsun.com.