Vitale, as part of ESPN's occasional quirky roster shuffles meant to spice up its TV tonnage, will call women's basketball for the first time as No. 3 Notre Dame plays at top-ranked Connecticut Saturday (9 p.m. ET).

The novelty makes sense given that ESPN faces competition from NFL playoff action in the time slot.

And Vitale, 70, who'll work alongside Dan Shulman and analyst Doris Burke, sounds game: "I'm at that stage of life where new things are really great. I'm excited!"

Wednesday, Vitale will call an NBA game — San Antonio-Utah — the same night as ESPN NBA announcers call a college game — Wake Forest-North Carolina — in ESPN's second annual on-air basketball assignment swap night.

And swapping on-air roles also allows Disney's ESPN and ABC to cross-promote its personalities. An extreme example comes next week when Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a co-host of ABC's The View daytime talk show, and her husband Tim, swap roles. On Tuesday, Elisabeth will appear on ESPN's NFL Live while Tim drops in on The View on Jan. 28. (Such a job swap would have been more interesting when Tim was an NFL quarterback.)

But with Vitale calling women's teams, there's more at stake here than the sports equivalent of, say, staffers at Disney World swapping their Mickey and Minnie costumes for a day. Saturday's game gives Vitale a chance to talk about the women's game, such as whether a woman might someday make the NBA — "I think skill-wise it could happen, but the physicality would be a major problem."

And it also makes a wildly improbable dream come true. Vitale says Burke, who has helped pioneered the idea of a woman calling men's TV basketball, told him Wednesday "that when she was young, she told a friend, 'Someday, I'll call a game with Dickie V.' But I don't know if she was just (kidding) me." She wasn't. Burke confirms that while a high school senior in 1983, she confessed that very dream to her best friend.