ALBUQUERQUE – The ghosts are plainly visible, if you look around close enough, if you inspect the 37-foot hole on this city’s southeast mesa where there sits a wonderful old gymnasium called The Pit.

Over here, you can see the bench where Guy V. Lewis chomped on that checkered towel all across a very long night in 1983. Over there is the basket where a North Carolina State forward named Lorenzo Charles plucked a wayward basketball out of the night, dunked it home, and delivered college basketball one of its most improbable treats.

And right here, at the bottom of this crater, you can still see a New York basketball character named Jimmy Valvano dashing from one end to the other, a blur in gray, looking for someone to hug, the numbers on the scoreboard above his head – North Carolina State 54, Houston 52 – frozen for all time, visible for all to see.

“If you care about college basketball,” Rick Pitino was saying the other day, “then you definitely remember watching that game. You definitely remember seeing Jimmy run around the court, and the players climbing on the basket, and you were definitely thinking, ‘Yeah, this is what this tournament is all about.’ It really can make your dreams come true.”

They don’t play national championship games in arenas as cozy as this one anymore, and so there is little chance for the ghosts to breathe, to stretch their legs out, to assume squatters rights as they have at The Pit since the night of April 4, 1983. The sterile, cavernous domes where those games are played now won’t permit them. There’s always a tractor pull scheduled for the following week.

So we have to settle for the regionals, which still allow college basketball to be played on college campuses, in college towns, which is where this tournament was always supposed to be played. This year, we get Pitino, another expatriate New Yorker, trying to drive his dreams every bit as much as Valvano once tried to push his.

They both started out in Queens – Valvano in Corona, Pitino in Cambria Heights – and went to high school on Long Island – Valvano playing for his father, Rocco, at Seaford, Pitino starring at St. Dominic’s, in Oyster Bay. They were both precocious basketball prodigies, Valvano coaching both Johns Hopkins and Bucknell in his 20s, Pitino taking over Boston University at age 25.

Once, they were even up for the same job, in their hometown, Pitino landing with the Knicks in the summer of 1987, a job Valvano desperately wanted.

Back on April 4, 1983, Valvano had said this about the long, strange basketball journey that had brought him to Albuquerque: “Sixteen years I’ve been coaching, which means 16 years I’ve been having the same dream, about being able to coach a game like the one I coached tonight.”

Twenty-two years later, Rick Pitino would echo those thoughts. “If you’re a competitor, you live for nights like this one,” he’d said, before leading his Louisville Cardinals into last night’s Sweet 16 showdown with top-seeded Washington. “This is what you dream about at night.”

Pitino already has the national championship ring Valvano pursued on his night in Albuquerque, but in many ways he comes here trying to scale just as arduous a mesa. It’s been nine long years since Pitino cut the nets at the Meadowlands. A lot’s happened since then. He lost an overtime heartbreaker in another NCAA Final. He failed terribly during an unhappy stint with the Celtics. His re-entry to the college game coincided with many of his brightest recruits fleeing to the NBA without even a courtesy stopover in Louisville.

So maybe this was precisely the place for Pitino to come, searching for a new professional plateau. A place where dreams live. We know. Because we can see the ghosts here, no matter where you look.