Everyone who has graduated from Duke University since 1986—a span of
more than 20 years—has something remarkable in common: they have all
gotten to witness at least one trip to the Final Four by the men's
basketball team before they left campus. Everyone, that is, except
members of the class of 1998. My graduating class. I picked the wrong
four years—the only wrong four years—to be at Duke
in the last quarter-century. My Blue Devils played in the national
title game three months before I arrived in the fall of 1994 (we lost
to Arkansas), and we made it back the year after I left, in 1999 (we
lost to Connecticut; we always lose to Connecticut). In between? Let's
see. My freshman year we stank. Coach Mike Krzyzewski hurt his back and
left the team in midseason to have surgery, and we missed the NCAA
tournament entirely, finishing with a 13-18 record. My sophomore year
we lost in the first round. My junior year, the second round. But
during my senior year we were a national power again, and we
steamrolled all the way to the NCAA tourney's Elite 8, where we ran up
a 17-point lead on Kentucky
with just over nine minutes to go, putting us a few heartbeats away
from total redemption. I was the editor of Duke's daily newspaper at
the time, and—in a feat of forehead-slapping hubris that I will regret
for the rest of my natural life—I had already laid out the next day's
triumphant front page.
I don't remember much about the
last nine minutes of that Kentucky game, other than their point guard,
Wayne Turner, repeatedly driving through our defense as if we were a
bunch of orange cones on the floor. I do remember that I didn't shed a
tear as the last few seconds of the last game of my Duke career slipped
away, if only because I'd already ripped out my eyeballs and thrown
them at the television. I definitely don't remember the final score. It
might've been 86-84, Kentucky. But don't ask me. I've blocked it out.
If
you've read this far you're probably snickering by now. This is how it
is to be a Duke fan: you—all of you—hate us. There's a writer named
Will Blythe, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, our sworn
enemy, who hates Duke so much that he wrote an entire book about it
called "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever," and it was a
best-seller. He spun his bile for a bunch of college students into
serious money. And you know what? We get it. We're fine with it. Our
pain is your joy. Our tears are your sweet tea. Whenever we lose, an
angel gets its wings.
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