The New Republic stations itself in Greensboro and reports on the ACC. They're concerned with the expansion- and the following soon-to-be-nostalgic paragraphs well explain why:

But what makes the ACC tournament particularly special is its coziness. Yes, I know it's hard to believe that anything in big-time college sports these days can be cozy--much less a nationally televised conference basketball tournament played in front of 23,000 screaming fans by a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds, a number of whom will soon be making millions of dollars in the NBA--but the ACC tournament pulls it off. One major reason for this, I think, is the unique place ACC basketball occupies in the South. Because the South, until very recently, did not have many professional sports teams, ACC basketball is a quasi-religion here. And the tournament is like that religion's high holy days. North Carolina--home to four of the conference's nine universities--essentially shuts down on quarterfinals Friday. Otherwise-responsible adults skip work to watch the games and kids play hooky from school, unless they go to one of the schools, as my wife did growing up in Chapel Hill, where teachers wheel television sets into their classrooms on that day. And when the tournament is played in a place like Greensboro--where it's the biggest event to happen all year--that sense of intimacy is only heightened.
But all that may be about to change, because this year's tournament was the last one to include only nine teams. Next year, when the tournament is played in Washington, D.C. (where 90 percent of the city's residents likely won't even realize the tournament is going on in their backyard), Miami and Virginia Tech will have joined the ACC, and two years after that, when the tournament is played in Tampa (where 90 percent of the city's residents likely won't even realize there is such a thing as ACC basketball), Boston College will have become a member of the conference, too. By then, it's a good bet that ACC basketball and the ACC tournament, and much of what's special about them, will have changed forever.

I'm generally pro-expansion; partly because I trust the ACC Commissioner. I tend to think that the fan-dom will not fade simply because far-away teams join the conference. The larger concern is the fairness of tougher/easy schedules played through the regular season. But, in any event--to ease the mind--I can assure the reader that this Carolina fan will always have a small tv or radio to play quietly in my office come tourney time.