By MIKE LOPRESTI
Gannett News Service

Congratulations to the basketball teams from Alabama and Alabama-Birmingham. Oh, sorry. It's seldom a good idea to put them in the same paragraph. And certainly not the same arena.

The authors of the two biggest upsets so far in the NCAA Tournament coexist 60 miles apart, close enough to annoy each other but not to play.

Alabama beats No. 1-ranked Stanford. Then UAB dumps No. 1 seed Kentucky. Suddenly the Heart of Dixie is also capital of college basketball, even if everyone knows the big story in the state last weekend was how good the defense looked at the Crimson Tide spring football game.

Which, by the way, was attended by 35,000, or about what Alabama drew to its first five home basketball games.

No matter. Basketball gets to be king for the week in Alabama, and we could throw a party for both teams. But then, who'd bring the brass knuckles?

Fact is fact. Close chums, they're not. They have met once. And that's when the NIT dragged them into the same second round game in 1993. UAB won 58-56.

"There's genuine hate on both sides," said Paul Finebaum, a syndicated talk show host and sportswriter in Birmingham.

Part of it is natural. The establishment at Tuscaloosa sneering at the interlopers in Birmingham, who did not even have an athletic program until the 1970s.

That's when Gene Bartow - having healed from the wounds of trying to replace John Wooden at UCLA - kick-started a UAB basketball program. Four years later, the Blazers were in the Mideast Regional championship, a place Alabama has never been, before or since.

The Tide faithful in Tuscaloosa didn't like him for that. Didn't like him for crowding them out of the spotlight. And they despised UAB when a Bartow letter to the NCAA leaked, suggesting Alabama had a history of cutting the corners on recruiting.

So a line was drawn in the cotton. "You had to choose," Finebaum said. "You couldn't be a fan of both."

They have stayed apart in basketball, loathing from a distance. Such as the UAB fans who took to calling their Tuscaloosa cousins UAT. So Alabama might have gone to Las Vegas to take on Oregon this season, and to Rhode Island to meet Providence, but it sure as blazes wasn't going to go down Interstate 20 to play UAB.

But now they turn up as co-Cinderellas, when everyone knows there isn't a storybook big enough for the both of them.

The Tide was once 12-10 but regrouped in time to make the field. Then it beat Stanford. Who could cook up a better tale? Well, UAB could the next day, shocking Kentucky at the wire.

"In some ways, what UAB did was steal a lot of thunder from what Alabama did," Finebaum said. "We may be a football state, and Stanford might be a school you have to read a book about to get familiar with, but nobody has to explain to anybody in Alabama the importance of beating Kentucky."

And now UAB hunts more big game - Kansas on Friday. "If you can beat Kentucky," said Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said, "you can beat anybody."

Alabama plays Syracuse with its own grand plan.

"I know in our state one thing we haven't done is put a team into the Final Four," said Alabama coach Mark Gottfried. "To elevate our sport here, that's the step hopefully we make."

Gottfried once was a Crimson Tide guard. UAB coach Mike Anderson is a Birmingham native son. They both know their state, and how two more victories would bring a day never seen before in Alabama. But it'd be galling for either camp to see the other guys do it.