Duke didn’t win a national championship, but it did something more improbable

Over the past five months, Cooper Flagg, Jon Scheyer and company somehow made the Blue Devils likeable

It takes a particularly improbable and devastating sequence of events for a nine-point lead to evaporate in the final 2:10 of a college basketball game.

Unfortunately for Duke, it managed to accomplish the feat on the biggest stage in the sport.

A Blue Devils team that appeared to be comfortably on its way to its 36th victory of the season and a spot in the national championship game helped orchestrate one of the biggest collapses in NCAA Tournament history Saturday night in a 70-67 loss to Houston in the Final Four. Duke made just one field goal in the final 10:30. It failed to bring down a single rebound in the final 3:22. Even after what had been a 14-point lead with 8:05 remaining had been trimmed to six with 35 seconds to play, it still had a win probability of 91.6%.

The exact moments that led to its ultimate demise were believable – turnovers, missed free throws, and a group of players and a coach showing their inexperience when they could least afford to – but it didn’t make it any less stunning.

When the horn sounded and their last chance at forcing overtime flew several feet over the backboard, the Blue Devils’ once-glistening national championship dreams were extinguished about as painfully as they could have been.

As I watched the dejected Blue Devils players walk off the court with 68,252 people in the Alamodome and millions of others glued to their televisions trying to process what they had just witnessed, I felt a sense of sadness more than anything else.

Winning a national championship in college basketball is outrageously difficult. After a grueling four-month regular season, a group of college-aged students has to survive a volatile, single-elimination crucible by winning sixth straight games against the country’s best competition. There’s a reason many of the best players and coaches in the sport’s history never got to enjoy their one shining moment. It’s really, really, really hard to get there and it requires not only talent, toughness and perseverance, but a bit of luck, too.

This particular Duke team, though, may have done something even more remarkable than navigate that obstacle course on its way to a happy ending. They made me like them.

The origins of Duke hate

Unlike many sports fans across America – at least those across certain pockets of North Carolina and the Acela Corridor – I wasn’t raised to hate Duke.

Both of my maternal grandparents went there, with my grandfather even playing on the Blue Devils’ football team that took part in the famous 1942 Rose Bowl, the first (and, for 79 years, only) Rose Bowl that wasn’t held in Pasadena. Duke was omnipresent around their house, from tattered old Blue Devils shirts my grandfather would wear to Iron Dukes window stickers to old programs, media guides and alumni magazines I’d look over. For a budding young sports fan, Duke was a connection point, even if his experience in World War II was the only thing my grandfather was more visibly anguished talking about than the Blue Devils’ then-hopeless football program.

Until I was a teenager, I didn’t have a whole lot of reasons to hate them, even beyond my family ties. Growing up more than 500 miles away from Durham, I had little to no exposure to their fans or alums outside of my dear old grandparents. When I was coming of age as a college basketball junkie, they had fun teams loaded with future, largely unobjectionable NBA players – Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, Jason Williams and Carlos Boozer, among others. As a Louisville fan, I didn’t view Christian Laettner as an irredeemable basketball terrorist, but as a sort of hero who made some of the most annoying people I knew extremely sad.

At a certain point, though, I got older, matured, shed a veil of innocence and developed a more comprehensive view of Duke – which is to say I, like countless others, grew to dislike them.

Duke was always going to be the place where my grandparents went and where my life, quite literally, became possible, but it also became the haven for the preppy, snobby and privileged, a place where being taught to pointedly and defiantly ask “Do you know who my father is?” is a part of the curriculum. At least part of the reason the Duke lacrosse scandal got as much traction as it did wasn’t just because of an overzealous district attorney, but because it confirmed so many of our preconceived notions about the school and those who go there that, for as heinous as the alleged crimes were, we almost wanted it to be true.

On the basketball front, those cool future NBA all-stars I first associated with the Blue Devils gave way to a parade of increasingly aggravating white guys. It started innocently enough – JJ Redick, for as brazenly cocky as he was and for as many soft-focus features ESPN did on his shitty attempts at poetry, could at least hoop – but soon devolved into the Greg Pauluses, Kyle Singlers, Grayson Allens and various forms of Plumlee of the world. Even my perverse appreciation for Laettner faded the more I learned about him.

And leading it all was the self-righteous maestro himself, Mike Krzyzewski, the living personification of “I respect you, but that doesn’t mean I have to like you” and someone whose self-righteous stench made even the otherwise coolest Duke teams fundamentally foul.

After the Blue Devils were solid-but-unspectacular in their first two seasons without Coach K, I thought the 2024-25 season had all the makings of a return to the Duke of old, with a top-ranked recruiting class led by a generational talent who had so much potential to be a source of hatred beyond his talent and lack of melanin.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

Duke’s players were likeable

At least part of the collective rancidness of Duke came from the players who populated their rosters going back to the earliest years of Krzyzewski’s legendary 42-year tenure.

Danny Ferry was oafish (and as we learned later, maybe a little bit racist). Laettner was the stereotypical 80s teen movie villain, only if that film ended with him stuffing the protagonist in a dumpster and walking away with his love interest. Steve Wojciechowski and other forms of floor-slapper were performatively intense and hard-working. Redick was smug and, worst of all, seemed to feed off all the hatred he received. Allen actively endangered anyone who got within five feet of him on the court. Duke consistently and unfailingly had a type and if you dared to fight against that archetype, like Brand did for having the audacity to leave school two years early to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, you felt the backlash.

But those traits that seemed baked into the walls and floorboards of Cameron Indoor Stadium for decades suddenly seemed to vanish with a team that could have very easily lived up to the not-so-proud tradition.

Cooper Flagg is a wunderkind, a player that had been hyped as a generational talent for years and who spent the summer before college holding his own against the best players in the NBA. His remarkable and exciting skillset may have very well shielded him from falling victim to the worst tendencies of his Duke predecessors, but there was just a good of a chance that his on-court intensity and overall excellence could have been mistaken for something more nefarious than it is given the school he chose to represent.

Flagg not only lived up to the immense expectations that greeted him coming into college, but exceeded them and did so with little to no controversy. He didn’t commit dirty fouls. He didn’t get into dust-ups. He clearly had confidence – anyone as good as him does – but he largely kept it in check. Away from the court, he seems like a relatively well-adjusted young man, especially given how long the spotlight has been on him. His teammates loved him. His coaches regularly praised him for more than just how many wins he helped the team rack up. His AT&T commercial, in which he showcased a sense of humor and level of self-awareness, was one of the few ads I haven’t gotten tired of during March Madness.

While Flagg set the tone, these surprisingly warm feelings for a juggernaut Duke team extended beyond him.

Kon Knueppel, Flagg’s sidekick for much of the season, was inoffensive, which isn’t exactly something I was prepared for from a five-star white guy from Wisconsin named “Kon.”

Seven-foot-two center Khaman Maluach had perhaps the most moving story on the team. Born in war-torn South Sudan, he grew up with his mother and siblings as refugees in Uganda and didn’t pick up basketball until he was a teenager, when a local coach, who noticed the rangy Maluach while driving by on his motorcycle, approached him and asked him about coming out to play for his high-school team. If that’s not moving enough, this video of him trying to identify celebrities on the wall of Madison Square Garden – highlighted by him seeing a picture of Billy Joel and thinking it was Stevie Wonder – is surely enough to at least crack a smile.

Lest you think there might be some particularly irksome role players, there aren’t really. Sion James (Tulane), Mason Gillis (Purdue) and Maliq Brown (Syracuse) all transferred in and bought into being complementary pieces when they could have easily been starters, if not stars, elsewhere. Tyrese Proctor was a former five-star recruit who settled nicely into being a third or fourth option as a junior and overcame past disappointments – injuries and inconsistent play – to turn in the best season of his career this year.

The idea of a palatable Duke team isn’t totally foreign. Though it was saddled with his self-aggrandizing retirement tour, Krzyzewski’s final team was pretty cool, with Paolo Banchero leading the way. The 2018-19 team was a bonafide cultural phenomenon, with Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish turning the Blue Devils into the closest thing college basketball has had to The Beatles in my lifetime.

What just might have separated this season’s Duke team, though, wasn’t just who was on the court. It was who was on the sideline.

Their coach was likeable, too

After the 2020-21 season, when Krzyzewski announced his impending retirement and Jon Scheyer was anointed as his successor, I wasn’t confident Duke wouldn’t magically become something more endearing than what it had been.

Though he never succumbed to the worst excesses of the worst Duke White Guys, Scheyer wasn’t exactly the easiest guy to rally behind during his playing days. He was the leading scorer on a Blue Devils team that denied us what would have been college basketball’s ultimate Cinderella story of the 21st century – little Butler winning the national title in front of a home crowd in Indianapolis – and he had a penchant for making some of the most ridiculous facial expressions over the course of a game, to the point where “Scheyer Face” is still a thing.

He shared too much in common with Krzyzewski, too. He learned at his feet both as a player and a coach. He, like Coach K, was a Chicago native who took over the Duke program when he was in his mid-30s.

Right as college basketball had finally rid itself of Krzyzewski – and sent him packing in gloriously humiliating fashion – it seemed like there was a chance it was simply exchanging him for a newer, younger model who might have his own insufferable four-decade reign over the sport.

Those fears haven’t been realized, though, at least not yet.

Scheyer is measured and calm on the sideline. He comes across as almost impossibly (and genuinely) polite in interviews without being preachy. He appears to have forged strong, sincere bonds with his players, even tearing up earlier during the early rounds of the NCAA Tournament when he was asked about Proctor during a press conference.

If nothing else, he earns some pity for carrying out the thankless and immensely pressurized task of following a legend. Being young and handsome doesn’t hurt, either.

Perhaps this is just a honeymoon period and he’s aided by college basketball being more nakedly transactional than it was in earlier eras, like when Krzyzewski chided the likes of John Calipari for employing the one-and-done model only to quickly turn around and benefit from it himself.

But the early returns are promising – even if his late-game plays need some work.

It’s still Duke, sure. But will it be that way for much longer?

For all that Flagg, Maluach, Scheyer and the rest of the team have done over the past five months to wash themselves of the sins of their forebears, this is still Duke, something it and its odious byproducts have seemed intent on reminding us over the course of the season.

The official Twitter account of the Blue Devils’ basketball program threw a tantrum when Pat Kelsey – who tripled Louisville’s win total from the previous season despite losing two of his six best players to season-ending injuries – beat Scheyer for ACC coach of the year honors. The Cameron Crazies are still an obnoxious collection of herbs that even Krzyzewski occasionally rebelled against in his final years at the school. The university still counts Stephen Miller among its alums.

There’s a chance this take looks hopelessly naive in a few years, if not a few months. Scheyer, at only 37 years old, still has plenty of opportunities to sully what to this point is an untarnished resume. The program’s NIL efforts are being bankrolled by an unnecessarily shadowy operation that will continue hauling in top-ranked classes that inevitably won’t be as winsome as its 2024 group.

For at least one season, though, we got a break from what could have been a truly exhausting Duke team. It didn’t seem like an accident that much of the Blue Devils’ run coincided with the latest season of “The White Lotus,” which featured two Duke grads who embodied the grossest caricatures of the school – a white-collar criminal father and his toxic finance bro son – but yet each had their own redemptive arcs in which they displayed as much personal and spiritual growth as anyone on the show.

With the Final Four loss to Houston, this season’s group of Blue Devils won’t be immortalized in the same way their advanced metrics had them positioned to be. Unfair as it might be, a team generally needs to win a championship to be considered an all-time great.

Having confetti fall on you as Luther Vandross’ sultry voice on “One Shining Moment” echoes across the stadium is the dream of any player who steps foot on a college court. A lot of people stumble into a title, though, especially at a program like Duke with five of them in its history. Even Brian Zoubek was the starter on a championship-winning team.

What this Blue Devils squad did was potentially more memorable. It will either be fondly remembered as an outlier if Duke reverts to its natural Dukeness in the years to come – or maybe, just maybe, it will be identified as the point when an object of perpetual scorn realized there was a better way forward.

(Photos: USA Today, Associated Press)