A quick look at sports news Wednesday showed few problems in pro and college basketball. Just don't plan on going anywhere in Atlanta, which once again is stopped dead by snow.
At least the city's NBA team is in a good place: The Atlanta Hawks played Wednesday in Toronto, a city that knows how to handle freezing precipitation of all kinds.
Meanwhile, the 2014 Winter Olympics went on as scheduled in Sochi, Russia ... where the daytime high was a balmy 64 and overnight lows along the Black Sea coast were in the mid-40s.
MORE: College basketball scores | NBA scores | Sochi: Hot images
Georgia Tech's game in Atlanta was postponed, to few people's surprise. The Yellow Jackets were to face Boston College.
Meanwhile, observers were wondering whether Duke would be able to reach North Carolina for the school's latest rivalry renewal. The schools' arenas are about 10 miles apart, but miserable efforts to clear roads could make this marathon a crawl.
Answer: The game would go off as expected with its 9 p.m. ET tipoff, North Carolina officials announced.
UPDATE: The game was later postponed.
#UNC-Duke postponed to later date, according to UNC AD Bubba Cunningham.
— Andrew Carter (@_andrewcarter) February 12, 2014UPDATE 2: The game has been rescheduled for Feb. 20.
Makeup date announced: UNC-Duke will play on Feb 20
— InsideCarolina (@InsideCarolina) February 12, 2014Vanderbilt will make plans for another trip to South Carolina, which announced its postponement Wednesday afternoon.
UPDATE: USC announced the game has been rescheduled for 4 p.m. Thursday.
Georgia Southern has postponed its home game against UNC-Greensboro scheduled for Wednesday night. The game was rescheduled for Thursday at 2 p.m.
South Carolina also has pushed back opening day for its nationally ranked baseball team because of the winter storm and troubles that its opponent, Bucknell, encountered trying to get to Columbia. The teams will play a split-admission doubleheader beginning noon Saturday.
Much of the eastern half of the United States was hit or under the threat of a winter storm that dropping snow and ice up the Southeast.
The National Weather Service kicked into overdrive with hyperbole regarding a region that believes ice in winter involves only drinks. It called the storm "catastrophic ... crippling ... paralyzing ... choose your adjective" for the South, including Atlanta, where a storm a few weeks ago created huge traffic jams. A National Weather Service map of the storm showed possible effects hitting 22 states from Texas to Maine.
A more serious look revealed more than 350,000 homes and businesses lacked power in several Southeastern states by early Wednesday afternoon, and the numbers were growing.
Don't plan on going anywhere in the Southern snow belt. Not only were roads a mess airlines were parking their planes.
More than 3,100 flights were canceled across the country, according to the website FlightAware. At least nine traffic deaths have been reported, including three killed after an ambulance careened off a slick Texas highway and caught fire and a firefighter killed when he was knocked off an interstate ramp in Dallas. The mayor of Washington planned to declare a snow emergency — meaning vehicles parked on emergency routes will be towed — for the first time since 2010.
With travel left to horses and huskies, a celebration of winter tourism in the Olympic village of Lake Placid, N.Y., was postponed because of storm forecasts. Plans had called for visitors take part in skiing, bobsledding and other winter sports at the sites that hosted the 1980 and 1932 Winter Olympics. A new date was not announced.
Sochi was bathed in sunshine and warmth amid the palm trees in the resort city. The heat made life difficult for skiers and snowboarders in the nearby mountains, where organizers stored surplus snow, but had yet to tap into it.
— Contributing: Associated Press