For Tennessee coaches Rick Barnes, Justin Gainey, it all started in North Carolina

The first time Rick Barnes witnessed basketball in Charlotte, he traveled all the way from the foothills of North Carolina down to the edge of Tyvola Road to the “old Coliseum,” as it’s now called.

“I watched Pistol Pete Maravich score 49 points against Clemson,” Barnes began to a bunch of reporters on Wednesday afternoon.

The 69-year-old Tennessee head coach, who will lead the second-seeded Volunteers against 15-seeded Saint Peter’s at 9:20 p.m. Thursday in the Spectrum Center, then transformed from coach to historian, from big-time basketball figure to a mere kid from Hickory.

His memories of growing up in North Carolina and developing into the Hall of Fame coach came in waves: He remembered that the best place to take dates in Charlotte was once The Open Kitchen, which is still around. He remembers the Charlotte Town Mall and how big the city was. He remembers playing all his high school games in Charlotte — and “that was a long ride back then” without the highways in place now.

He even remembers the first game he coached at the college level being in the Coliseum, as an assistant at Davidson in 1978.

“I remember telling recruits: 11,666,” Barnes said, referring to the capacity of the Coliseum, which was regularly filled to the brim when college basketball came to town. “That was also the first time I was personally able to meet Coach (Dean) Smith. I watched his team beat John Kuester’s Boston University team right there. So I do have a lot of great memories.”

It’s safe to say Barnes has a chance to make more great memories during this Charlotte visit, too. The Top 10-ranked Vols are among the most prolific scoring teams in the country with one of the best scorers in the nation in Dalton Knecht, whose 25.5 points per game led all Division I players in league play en route to his SEC Player of the Year nod. To get out of Charlotte and into the Sweet 16, Tennessee will need to beat Saint Peter’s on Thursday and then the winner of Texas and Colorado State on Saturday.

But as much as this week is a business trip for the old-guard coach, it’s also a homecoming.

It’s a homecoming for others on his team, too. Jonas Aidoo, from Durham, and Freddie Dilione, from Fayetteville, are both from the Tar Heel state. So too is associate head coach Justin Gainey, who grew up in High Point and played AAU for the Charlotte Royals and made a name for himself as a cornerstone for the N.C. State Wolfpack during the early Herb Sendek years.

Gainey played against Barnes when the coach was at Clemson.

“He says he’s 4-0 against me, and in actuality, we’re 2-2 against each other,” Gainey said with a laugh in an interview with The Charlotte Observer. (In the interview room, Barnes said Gainey had “helped me win eight games,” the joke expanding with time.) “But it’s fun. It’s fun to just talk about those days and reminisce.”

Gainey added of Barnes: “He’s a North Carolina guy through and through. And same here.”

Gainey has his own stories, too, of course.

The first time he coached in the Spectrum Center was in 2008, when Gainey was an assistant director of basketball operations at N.C. State under Sidney Lowe. The Wolfpack lost to nationally ranked Davidson, 72-67, thanks to 44 points from an undersized Charlotte legend named Stephen Curry. He played in the Charlotte Coliseum twice, in his junior and senior years.

Gainey has thought about his freshman-year ACC Tournament, in 1997, a lot recently. That year, he set the record for most minutes played in the tournament as he played every minute of all four of N.C. State’s games in four days — a huge part of a run not too dissimilar from the magical, redemptive one the Wolfpack punctuated a few days ago.

That year, his team fell to UNC in the tournament final. A different result came this year.

“It was exciting to watch those guys, and their journey, their path,” Gainey said. “And it’s funny: I went through it as a player in 1997, and then my first year on staff with Sidney Lowe, we went from first round and made it to the championship and lost to Carolina in the championship. ... And so now to see those guys back at it, I thought the third time’s gotta be the charm. It was fun to watch. I was excited for those guys to finally get that breakthrough.”

Barnes and Gainey have other memories they didn’t share Wednesday, of course. The well is endless. Barnes, the man who once stared down Dean Smith, jaw to jaw, in the 1995 ACC Tournament — who was once a thorn in the side of the established guard of ACC coaches — is now the old guard himself, still going, still here after a bunch of his contemporaries left.

A Final Four run is within reach. It would mean a lot to Barnes. It’d be his second appearance in his Hall of Fame career. It would mean a lot to the Vols, too, who are still searching for their first.

And if it would happen, the same would ring true for everyone:

It all started in North Carolina.