I know, I know. The name of the University of Louisville’s new $248 million arena is as unbecoming and unwieldy as Freedom Hall was classy. The world’s largest food company, which is based in Louisville, coughed up $20 million for 10 years for the right to call the state-of-the-art, 22,000-seat hoops palace the “KFC Yum! Center.”

This is the same corporation, of course, that paid Churchill Downs a small fortune to officially begin calling its signature race “The Kentucky Derby sponsored by Yum! Brands.” In case you were wondering, Yum! Is the parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver’s, and, of course, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Interestingly, however, the only pizza available for purchase inside the KFC Yum! Center will be Papa John’s, because of a pre-existing agreement between that company and the Kentucky State Fair Board, which operates both the new arena and Freedom Hall.

Of course, Louisville also is the home of John Schnatter, the found of Papa John’s. He originally put up some money for the new arena, but withdrew it and put it, instead, into the renovation of Louisville’s football stadium, which is named “Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium.”

By now you are probably wondering how Muhammad Ali’s hometown became Pizza City, U.S.A. The only thing I can tell you is that the state also ranks among the nation’s leaders in obesity. The hottest new food item at this year’s Kentucky State Fair – and I am not making this up – was a cheeseburger with Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the bun.

But I digress.

Once you get past the name, the new home for Coach Rick Pitino’s program may well be the finest arena in the nation that has a college team for its principal tenant. It was built to NBA specifications, but there’s no NBA team to share it with the Cardinals, which is just fine with U of L’s rabid fan base.

But being the principal tenant is a double-edged sword. In exchange for getting first call on dates for games and practice, the Cards must sell out every home game in order to help pay off the debt. They can’t afford to have a down season that would cost them fans.

The only outfit with more pressure on it than Pitino’s program is the organization hired to book concerts and shows into the new arena. Needing to fill somewhere around 200 dates to have even a chance of breaking even, and not having a pro team to fill up 85 or so dates, the Fair Board and the Louisville Arena Authority are faced with a daunting economic challenge.

If the arena turns out to be a House of Cards, financially speaking, it’s conceivable that U of L would have to give up some of its sovereignty in order to attract a pro team to town. (The city has been without pro ball since the Kentucky Colonels folded their tent in 1976 rather than become part of the NBA-ABA merger.)

But now is the time for celebration, not speculation. All that’s important is that Louisville has this marvelous new arena that will be officially dedicated when Butler comes to town on Nov. 16. In order to break in the new arena properly, by the way, the Cardinals will play only one road game – against Western Kentucky in Bowling Green – before Jan. 9, 2011.

If you are wondering how all this is being received down the road in Lexington, the answer is, well, unprintable. It rankles some UK insiders that the man mainly responsible for the new Louisville arena is Jim Host, a UK graduate who started a college sports marketing company in 1972 and built it into the biggest and best in the business. Although he introduced the NCAA to Corporate America, Host’s favorite client was his alma mater, where he had plenty of behind-the-scenes say about a lot of things, including the hiring and firing of coaches.

But when Dr. Lee Todd became UK’s president, he vowed to “clean up” the athletics department, and never mind that so far as anybody could see at that time, the athletics department, thanks to the tenure of C.M. Newton, was cleaner than it had been for years. Nevertheless, Todd and his hand-picked athletics director, Mitch Barnhart, cut UK’s ties with Host, Newton, and heaven only knows whom else.

Big mistake.

Had Newton been around for consulting purposes, Barnhart and Todd never would have hired Billy Clyde Gillispie. And had Host stayed in the fold, he wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to spearhead the building of the new arena in Louisville. “Without Jim,” says Arena Authority member Dan Ulmer, “this project never would have gotten done. He’s the only one who could have done it.”

Naturally, plans already are being made for a new arena in Lexington. The driving force is IMG, who owns Host’s old company. Since Kentucky’s state treasury is broke, the powers-that-be are trying to figure out a way fro the new Lexington arena to be privately financed.

Please don’t laugh. Kentucky’s basketball players have moved into a plush new dorm financed, and named for, the state’s coal industry. Although the commonwealth ranks near the bottom in almost every socio-economic indicator, there’s always money available for UK basketball.

For the past 15 or so months, U of L has taken a beating in the P.R. wars. With Pitino pretty much holed up in a bunker because of the Karen Sypher scandal, John Calipari has dominated the commonwealth even more than Pitino did against Denny Crum in the 1990s. When West Virginia upset UK in last season’s NCAA tournament, the happiest city outside of Morgantown may well have been Louisville.

But now there’s growing evidence that the new arena, along with new assistant Tim Fuller, is putting U of L back into the recruiting wars at a high level. Every recruit who has seen “The Bucket” – that’s what some fans are calling the KFC Yum! Center – has raved about it.

Which brings us to the night of Wednesday, Dec. 8.

At 7 p.m., the Cardinals will play host to San Francisco in their new, state-of-the-art, Pizza Palace on the banks of the Ohio River. At 9:30 p.m., Kentucky and Notre Dame will meet in Freedom Hall as part of the Big East-Southeastern Conference package.

If both games are sold out, and it’ll be stunning if they’re not, that means that more than 40,000 fans will be watching hoops that night in the state’s largest city. You can bet the two fan bases will be trying to out-posture each other. There’s no way that either fan wants to be accused of being less insane than the other.

Only 23 days later, UK and U of L will meet at noon on New Year’s Eve in the KFC Yum! Center. Under the terms of the agreement between U of L and the Kentucky State Fair Board, which manages both the new and old arenas, the only way the Wildcats will ever play in the KFC Yum! Center is (a) as the visitor against the Cardinals, or (b) if it’s an NCAA tournament game.

This is strictly by design. For more than five decades, UK has played at least one home game in Louisville, the state’s largest city. During the glory days of Adolph Rupp and Joe B. Hall, the Wildcats often would draw as many to Freedom Hall for their shoot-around as the Cards would draw for regular games.

Even in recent years, when UK hasn’t been able to sell out games in Freedom Hall due to mediocre competition, it still was galling to U of L diehards that they had to turn over their arena to Big Blue Nation. It was an invasion of their space that showed recruits that UK still was THE program in the state, even in Louisville.

To make the unique double-header even more attraction in a city with a large Catholic community, both the visitors are Catholic schools. San Francisco’s heyday came in 1955-’56, when Bill Russell led the Dons to consecutive NCAA titles. Notre Dame, although far bigger than San Francisco, has never won the national title. In fact, the school’s only Final Four appearance came in 1978, when it lost to Duke in the semifinals (the Blue Devils then lost to UK).

Harold Workman, president and CEO of the Fair Board, has told UK he will paint the Freedom Hall floor blue, a la Boise State, if the Wildcats agree to play at least three games there. But that’s not likely to happen because UK can make more money playing cupcakes in Rupp Arena than by playing somebody good in Louisville.

If Philadelphia can live with the Wells Fargo Center and Buffalo can make do with the HSBC Arena, I guess I’ll get used to the KFC Yum! Center. Then again, maybe not. It will never resonate the way Freedom Hall did. I think I’ll just go with the flow and call it “The Bucket.”