There are no odds posted on this week's Las Vegas Line for what would be the biggest upset in sports.

Rather, it is North and South Korea agreeing to field a combined team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and next year's Asian Games. One peninsula, one team. One big step toward unification.

Two countries separated by the most strident of politics for 60 years now talking in apparent earnest about getting together to do more than trade invective over a table at Panmunjom. A country that tried to blast the other's cabinet to smithereens staking out common ground.

And some people think reconciliations in sports don't get any bigger than Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant.

When you talk rivalries, these governments have Ohio State-Michigan, Texas-Oklahoma — and anybody else you'd care to mention — beat.

These aren't the Red Sox and Yankees fighting with checkbooks and swapping dugout insults, but two well-armed belligerents staring at each other across the most heavily fortified strip of land in the history of the world. Two armies technically still at war now backed by nukes.

When athletes from the two marched together in the opening ceremonies at the 2000 and '04 Olympics — but competed separately — the world, not to mention their neighbors, applauded and waited for more. And they still wait after what has been more than 40 years in the talking.

For as it has tended to do on any number of fronts since the end of World War II, politics intruded and dogma divided. It is what has kept, despite an ongoing trickle of cultural, business and family exchanges, their land divided.

But don't underestimate the role sports can play in diplomacy and how competition can inspire cooperation. Recall what ping pong diplomacy meant for U.S.-China relations in the 1970s?

So, when representatives of the two Koreas met in Macau this week and announced an agreement in principle to field a single team to compete in the upcoming Asian and Olympic Games under a blue flag depicting a united Korea and using the traditional song "Arirang" as their anthem, hope was rekindled. When they mapped plans to meet next month in Kaesong, where rail tracks once linked the two nations, fingers were crossed.

Of course, when the distrust has been as wide as the 155-mile Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South, the devil remains very much in the details. These are, after all, nations that speak and write the same language but use different words to express "Korea."

Maybe that will change one not-too-distant day, too, when, instead of carrying a flag that shows a united Korea they will become one.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.