Diehl, along with the three other area supervisors for Philadelphia-Washington, metropolitan New York-New Jersey, and Upstate New York, is responsible for the laborious paperwork of pairing officials before the season begins. "We religiously hold to not overexposing our officials" he says, as normally a ref will work only two home games and two on the road for the same college.

The ratings are the catch-all that govern pairings and scheduling. Their justification lies in the dog-eat-dog theory that "you're only as good as your next game" and Diehl adds that "we manage through years and years to be consistently lousy."

Those officials with the top ratings work the top games and, in the process accumulate the fattest bankrolls. The 500 to 600 CBOA officials fall into four salary categories, in which they are cast by their respective ratings. Excluding expenses, a college may select a referee who commands anywhere from $40-$80 per game.

The selection procedure usually means that if there's a donnybrook in the area, you will probably find Diehl in the limelight working with a partner from New Jersey or New York, a setup which is known as a "split crew." This was the case for the televised Boston College-Georgetown hoedown on February 21, for which Diehl arrived his usual hour and a half before the opening tap-off. He had worked Harvard's five-point loss to Penn the night before at Philadelphia's Palestra.

For Diehl, good refereeing consists of a triad of intangibles he labels consistency, acceptance, and control. Hannon phrases his motto as "knowledge of the rules, good judgment, and fairness." Whatever the criteria, every official aims to have "the perfect angle" when he makes a call, which Diehl describes as having the play in full view from its inception to the time of the infraction. "There is no perfect position, you've got to work for it," he adds. For Hannon "the key to the whole thing is hustling and getting down the court."

Every ref adds his personal flourish to his calls, especially some flamboyant types whom fans call pejoratively "hop, skip, and a jump-you're a chump refs." Nevertheless Diehl says that positioning and hand signalling have become basically uniform.

Diehl is consistently at loggerheads with spectators and coaches, the dual bane of the ref. He credits widespread fan misunderstanding of the game to the basketball playing boom. The result is "they're all experts. In football they blow a whistle, throw a flag, and go into a huddle. No one pretends to understand the game."

Both Diehl and Hannon stress that college coaches are under the gun every time their team takes to the floor, so any sympathy is misplaced. "You have to keep in mind that there's a coach on the other side of the bench and it's his bread and butter too," Diehl says. Both profess immunity to the hostile bantering of coaches. "You just can't worry that the guy on the other end of the bench doesn't like your work," Hannon says. "A certain few coaches are going to bother everyone." Diehl ribs coaches who huddle their charges in protracted timeouts, saying "they do the coaching and then they say the rosary."

Diehl works around three games a week while Hannon does 70 to 80 in a season. A pedometer attached to an NBA referee clocked just over six miles in a game, which is a lot of mileage considering younger officials may oversee up to 150 games over a campaign.

The fine art of refereeing has evolved over the years, although most of the changes are not on the order of macro-mutations. Besides basic rule changes that have come in, such as the ban on dunking and an automatic technical for vibrating the backboard, Diehl describes a fundamental change in the officials' psychological pampering of players. "We've had to adjust our thinking and our approach because the generation has changed, with their free speech so to speak. We'll give a kind word now instead of a technical."

The reward for officiating is neither lucre nor recognition but "a job well done," Diehl says. "Self-satisfaction is the only satisfaction you're really going to get. We're out there because we want to be out there, not because we have to be." Diehl says "if any official is looking for recognition he should get the hell out. The best compliment is not to be recognized the next day."

Refs may not court recognition or notoriety but while working the nationally prominent games or "suicide games" as Diehl calls them, he and Hannon are about as innocuous as a tandem of sprightly young tarantulas. The two may be roving foci for the stewing frustrations of players whose shots aren't dropping, coaches who have an axe to grind, and a steady verbal effluvium from the stands, but at all costs they try to avoid controversy while on the floor. In short, "if you're constantly in controversy, you're not going to last too long," says Diehl.

The hour and a half before Georgetown is pitted with B.C. is practically over and Diehl emerges from the officials' dressing room for the tinny rendition of the national anthem. After the introductions, replete with cart-wheeling cheerleaders, Diehl briskly steps into the centercourt circle, gives the ball an authoritative toss, and sets out on his six-mile trek with a sure stride and stony-faced impenetrability that makes his profession the lodestar of steadfast control and lockjawed authority in college basketball, while the festooned NBC logos, pied banners, and roar of "Go, Hoyas go" from the Georgetown faithful symbolize all that is hoopla and froth in the big time.