Chicago ? Don’t be misled as you watch this week’s Big Ten/ACC Challenge. That is just a grandiose title that barely brushes up against reality.

This is no challenge at all, no smackdown to determine a conference’s superiority or settle where the best basketball is played. It is simply a bunch of early-season games.

Some folks, like Maryland coach Gary Williams, would have you believe differently. He was caterwauling before last year’s Challenge about the lack of respect given the Atlantic Coast Conference, breathlessly noting: “We had four teams in the (2006 NCAA) tournament. We’ve beaten the Big Ten in (every) ACC Challenge, and the Big Ten’s gotten more teams in than us in five of those seven years, I believe.”

He was right about his conference’s superiority in this annual go-around, which kicks off for the ninth time tonight with Wake Forest’s visit to Iowa. The ACC has won the majority of the games every year the Challenge has been played. Its overall record is a glittering 48-27, and it has the only team that has skated through it unscathed: Duke is a perfect 8-0.

But to think that should determine how many bids a conference should get come March is to think a marathon’s winner is determined in the first three miles. For that is just what any season is, a marathon, and as November rushes toward December, it is filled with runners jostling for position and finding rhythm.

Consider Wednesday night’s game between North Carolina and Ohio State. The top-ranked Tar Heels are festooned with experience and led by national player-of-the-year candidate Tyler Hansbrough. Even at this early date, they are close to a finished product.

That is not so with the Buckeyes, who lost the core of their team from a year ago with the early departures of Greg Oden and Mike Conley Jr. So they are busy filling those yawning holes and fitting in some talented freshmen. Unlike North Carolina, they are far from what they will be when the regular season closes.

Most teams, in fact, are far from what they will be in February, which is why this Challenge and the Big East/SEC Invitational and the Big 12/Pac-10 Hardwood Series are all little more than money-makers and television programming. Yes, some impressions can be formed. But, no, those impressions are not indelible.

They are merely measuring sticks. That is certainly the case with a team like Wisconsin, which for the first time this season will wander away from the considerable comforts of its Kohl Center to face Duke in the snake pit that is Cameron Indoor Stadium. In that hostile environment, the Badgers will learn the legitimacy of their undefeated record. But they will not reveal what they will be.

That is why Purdue coach Matt Painter got it right Saturday when asked about his team’s game at Clemson. He said nothing of upholding the Big Ten’s honor or of buffing the league’s image or even of positioning the Boilermakers for a tournament bid. Instead, considering his team’s youth and inexperience, he said:

“We haven’t had a team press us yet. We haven’t had a team get into us in the halfcourt the way Clemson does. We have not faced that kind of athleticism. … We just have to make sure we understand the beast we’re getting ready to battle.”

Just as we all should understand that the beasts we view the next three nights will be different come the marathon’s last three miles.