UNC upended Coach K’s big moments
NEW ORLEANS — In the waning seconds of the 1,438th and final college basketball game Mike Krzyzewski would ever coach at Duke, he was not going to show the world what it wanted to see.
When seasons end, they end harshly. That’s all coaches really know, except for the lucky few who get to hold the championship trophy. Sometimes that realization is long in the making. Often, especially in the Final Four, it happens so fast that it’s impossible to process until much later.
But whatever was going through his mind as he sat on a stool with the same half-scowl he had shown through most of the final 80 seconds as an all-time Final Four game fell apart for his team, Krzyzewski accepted that he couldn’t do anything more. North Carolina had beaten Duke, 81-77. His coaching career, perhaps the greatest ever in the sport of college basketball, was over.
Whether you adored, despised or simply respected the man for his accomplishments, it was a moment that demanded for one last reaction, one last image for the world to hold onto as he exited the stage, having lost his last game to the rival program that has helped frame his greatness.
Instead, after 42 years at Duke and five national championships, his only trophy was keeping a stiff upper lip.
“It’s not about me,” he would say later. “Especially right now.”
It had been a common theme of Krzyzewski’s goodbye tour to claim that it wasn’t about him, when we all knew it really was. Saturday, for the first time, it finally rang somewhat true.
A lot of players have represented Duke and North Carolina in the 100 games Krzyzewski has coached in college basketball’s greatest rivalry. None of them put on a finer performance on a bigger stage than players on the Caesars Superdome floor Saturday with a spot in the national championship game on the line.
For 39 minutes, Duke’s players delivered. And in the final minute, North Car
olina’s players delivered just a little bit more.
“It was a game that the winner was going to be joyous and the loser was going to be in agony, and that’s the type of game we expected,” Krzyzewski said. “We would have liked to have been on the other side of it, but I’m proud of what my guys have done. They’ve been an amazing group for me. The youngest team I’ve coached. We had our chances tonight. They made a couple more plays than we did.”
No matter what happened Monday night when North Carolina played Kansas — a remarkable story on its own for a team that spent most of an aimless season just trying to get into the NCAA Tournament — the legend of this game is already set for eternity. North Carolina didn’t just put itself into a national championship game under a first-year coach in Hubert Davis, it delivered the final knockout to the coach its fans spent four decades despising.
Just four weeks ago, North Carolina fans thought beating Krzyzewski in his final home game at Cameron Indoor Stadium was an all-time program memory. Getting the final word on this rivalry, and
tying it at exactly 50-50 in the Krzyzewski era, might be even more satisfying than winning the whole thing.
“Dwelling on the two wins against Duke doesn’t help us against Kansas,” Davis said. “We have to put that in a box to think about over the summer.” There’s little doubt they will.
As for Krzyzewski, he’ll probably never share how he truly processes what happened in his final game. Over four decades, he’s sometimes been a poor loser who lectured his way through his emotions. Other times, like when Duke was stunned by Mercer in the 2014 tournament, he’s been so magnanimous he went into the opposing locker room to congratulate the players personally.
Krzyzewski has won enough and lost enough that, at 75, you’d think it would be easier to accept. When he decided to come back for one more year, Krzyzewski knew it was always likely to end not just with a loss, but with a young team playing young.
Through the first four rounds of this tournament, perhaps a part of him believed that the Blue Devils had grown out of that possibility. Round by round, they’d been better and tougher. The idea of young Paolo Banchero and Mark Williams and Trevor Keels and A.J. Griffin carrying him to one last title started to seem more real.
“He was so committed to us all year,” Banchero said. “Never made it about him.”
But the prospect of having to play North Carolina one more time didn’t just make it more emotionally complicated for everyone around both programs, it was a basketball challenge that brought out greatness in both teams.
Few things in sports live up to the hype. But this game did, from the pregame introductions that were drowned out by a cacophony of noise all the way to Caleb Love’s dagger 3-pointer with 25 seconds left that turned North Carolina’s one-point lead into something Duke could not overcome.
In between was pure brilliance. Every time Duke started to pull away, the Tar Heels responded with a flurry of offensive cutbacks and jump shots.
After Wendell Moore drilled a three from the top of the key to put Duke on top 74-73 with a little more than a minute left, it seemed like it might just be meant for Krzyzewski to play in the final game of the season. And then, in a blink, the magic ran out.
It did not happen in one dramatic failure, but by small mistakes. A missed free throw here, a failure to grab an offensive rebound there. And when the game was there to be won, the Tar Heels took it.
It doesn’t take away anything that Krzyzewski accomplished. It doesn’t make him anything less than the greatest college basketball coach of all time. But on this night, in this building, in a forever March Madness moment, it was the opponent that rose to the occasion a little bit more.
And all Krzyzewski could do is watch the end, get off his stool and shake Davis’ hand for the last time. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve been blessed to be in the arena, and when you’re in the arena you’re either going to come out feeling great or you’re going to feel agony. But you’ll always feel great about being in the arena and I’m sure that’s the thing when I look back that I’ll miss. I wont be in the arena anymore. But damn, I was in the arena for a long time. And these kids made my last time in the arena an amazing one.”