COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- College basketball shuts the door on part of its history Sunday when Maryland and Virginia meet in the last game to be played at Maryland's Cole Field House.

Home today to the Maryland Terrapins, Cole has in the past hosted a slew of landmark games involving everyone from Lew Alcindor, to Len Bias, to -- most importantly -- a team of players most people couldn't name.

In 1965 Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), the center for Power Memorial High School in New York, put his 71-game high school winning streak on the line at Cole, in a face-off with DeMatha Catholic High School of Hyattsville, Md., and its legendary coach Morgan Wootten.

"In practice I had our tallest guy, who was 6-foot-7, blocking shots with a tennis racket," Wootten said. "There's no way you can prepare for a guy who's 7-3."

But DeMatha prevailed, 46-43, in a game that helped put high school basketball on the map.

"One thing I'll never forget," he said. "With about a minute to go, the announcer said to the crowd, 'No matter who wins, I think you'll agree this is the most important high school basketball game ever played.'

"Cole is special. It's like a museum."

Twice Cole Field House has hosted the Final Four --the only on-campus venue to host more than one. And it may be that no Final Four was as important as the one played there in 1966.

Unheralded Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso) collided with Adolph Rupp and his University of Kentucky team (known as "Rupp's Runts" because guard Tommy Kron, at 6-5, was the tallest player on the team) in the NCAA championship game.

Texas Western had an all-black starting five for the game, while Rupp's players, among them current Miami Heat coach Pat Riley and ESPN broadcaster Larry Conley, were all white.

"It's not like the entire team was black," Bobby Joe Hill, the 5-foot 10-inch Miners guard who made that year's all-tournament team, said. "It just happened that the seven guys we played that game were."

The Miners defeated the Wildcats, 72-65, and helped destroy color barriers in college basketball.

"There wasn't much bad stuff in the stands," Hill said. "They were all friendly. They just came to watch ball."

Today Cole's roof is leaky, its compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act spotty, and the air conditioning non-existent. But from the day it opened, on Dec. 2, 1955 with a 67-55 thrashing of Virginia, the William P. Cole Jr. Student Activities Building --as it is officially known --has been making legends.

When the building was completed, it was the second largest arena on the East Coast, trailing only Madison Square Garden.

It sat 12,000, and was so vast that the Capital Bullets (now the Washington Wizards) played their home games there while the Capital Centre was being completed.

In 1970 John Wooden won his fourth-straight NCAA Division I championship at UCLA --on the way to seven in a row --at Cole, by defeating Jacksonville, 80-69.

Things have been up and down since.

Charles "Lefty" Driesell brought mobile courtside seating to the building, increasing capacity to 14,500. He also introduced Midnight Madness, which annually ushers in the first day of practice.

After peaking at 13,427 in 1974-75, attendance at Maryland games swooned in the late '70s, dropping for six straight seasons. But Driesell had enough magic left to squish Bill Laimbeer and his top-ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish in 1979 -- one of seven number-one teams to be toppled at Cole.

The program and the fans continued to rebound with Len Bias' introduction in the early 1980s. But June 19, 1986 -- two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics -- Bias was found dead of a cocaine overdose, rocking the University of Maryland.

Driesell begat Bob Wade, who begat Gary Williams, who took over after Wade's three-year run ran the program into the ground. After battling for years to overcome sanctions garnered by Wade's 18 NCAA violations, Williams last year took the program to its first-ever Final Four.

Cole Field House has seen a program built and rebuilt. It has seen champions crowned, stereotypes crumble, and a No. 2 seed leveled (Syracuse was the first No. 2 seed to lose in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, when it was dropped by No. 15 seed Richmond at Cole in 1991).

A new state-of-the-art, $101-million arena, the Comcast Center, will open on campus next year. But Cole will never be forgotten.