D4 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
now the fact that it’s the Final
Four, realizing that this is not
only ‘Coach’s last something’ but
it’s our last something as a
team.”
So there was a reality with the
rivalry Saturday night: Love him
or hate him — and there doesn’t
appear to be much middle
ground — it will no longer have
Krzyzewski’s snarl or smile on
the sideline. When he coached
his first game against the Tar
Heels, Dean Smith was the
legend on the opposite sideline,
and Hubert Davis hadn’t yet
shown up in Chapel Hill to play
for the Hall of Famer. Now Smith
has died, as has Bill Guthridge,
his successor. Roy Williams,
another Hall of Famer, retired
the summer Krzyzewski
announced he would stop down.
Too many layers to process.
Kansas — polished, poised
Kansas — awaits the Tar Heels
on Monday night. It will matter
to them and greatly. But on
Saturday night, in the most
important game of college
basketball’s most important
rivalry, North Carolina extended
a crazy run and ended a
legendary career. How can the
sport improve on that?back. The one that mattered
most: a 62-57 lead, with nothing
short of a berth in the national
title game at stake. It took all of
40 seconds for Duke to flip that
back.
Saturday night showed why
the time between when the
matchup was set and Saturday
night was six days — but felt
interminable.
“It’s not more important
because it’s North Carolina,”
Krzyzewski protested. “It would
always be important if it’s North
Carolina.”
That’s true on a pickup court
somewhere along U.S. highway
15-501, the eight-mile stretch of
asphalt that connects the two
schools. That’s true here, where
the stakes were never higher.
Over the past month,
Krzyzewski has done his best to
distance his retirement tour
from his team. At some point —
and last month’s loss to the Heels
in Cameron Indoor Stadium was
a sign of this — it became a
weight. His team couldn’t lift it
one last time.
“It’s kind of been something
that’s been following us really
every game we play in — ‘Coach’s
last something,’ ” Moore said. “SoWhen North Carolina’s Love
converted a drive that forced a
Duke timeout in the midst of
what became a 13-0 Tar Heels
run, he could have raced to one
corner — near his own bench —
and fired up the fans. Instead, he
stomped toward the Duke crowd
and flexed. When Love air-balled
a three-pointer moments later,
the Blue Devils crowd roared at
him. The rivalry is built with that
kind of equal time between
supporting your own and dissing
the other.
So at airport gates and in
rental car lines — not to mention
the saloons that spilled into the
streets of this hard-partying
town — the history and the
stakes dominated conversation.
There’s no moment that can’t be
relived and re-litigated.
Memories are long. These two
fan bases don’t agree on whether
water is wet, so parsing the best
moments of the rivalry isn’t so
much a sport as it is a way of life.
Jerry Stackhouse’s up-and-
under baseline dunk in 1995 at
Cameron Indoor Stadium was
exhilarating in Chapel Hill, dark
in Durham. Austin Rivers’s
buzzer-beating three-pointer in
2012 at the Dean Dome salvagedend.
How’s this for a final six
minutes? Tied at 65. Tied at 67.
Carolina up 70-68. Duke up 71-70
on Trevor Keels’s three-pointer.
Carolina up 73-71 on Brady
Manek’s response. Duke to the
lead on Wendell Moore Jr.’s
response to the response.
Carolina by a point on R.J.
Davis’s two free throws.
And then Caleb Love, the
three that essentially ended
Krzyzewski’s career.
Final: North Carolina 81, Duke
77.
Dizzying, regardless of the
teams. That it was these two? In
these circumstances? Please.
And North Carolina never has
to debate — ever again — the
most satisfying victory over its
despised rival. It was and forever
will be what happened here
Saturday.
There was just so much going
on. Far too much. The two fan
bases — one in sky blue, the
other in royal blue, polar
opposites even if they’re just
different hues — were seated
diagonally from each other. Best
to keep them separated.
SVRLUGA FROM D1
It stood 45-41 and soon 47-41,
and the nervelessness the young
Duke players had located in this
tournament, the way they had
solved the singular, precarious
pressure of their coach’s exit
tour, reached its latest, sternest
test.
They passed that, too, and
when Wendell Moore Jr. got a
steal and a galloping layup for a
51-49 lead, the game went into a
phase of frantic wonder. Leaky
Black hit a three (52-51, North
Carolina). Moore hit a short
jumper (53-52, Duke). Manek
stuck a three from the left corner
with a hand in his face (55-53,
North Carolina). Banchero made
the kind of power move pretty
much impossible to defend
( 55-55).
Tight games reserve the right
to turn on flukes, and that’s what
happened next. Banchero made a
terrific block of Davis, then
reached out of bounds to save it
in but saved it in to Bacot, whose
quick layup came with a drawn
foul. That opened North Caro-
lina’s window at 58-55. It went to
60-55 with Love’s short jumper
from the right. It went to 62-57
when Davis stopped on the right
baseline and nailed one.
Of course, on came Duke, with
Banchero’s power and Roach’s
wizardry erasing that inconve-
nience. And on and on it went,
maybe even too beautiful to ap-
pear as a nightmare.above the bench, looking ashen
at times. First-year North Caro-
lina coach Hubert Davis stood,
walked, cajoled. The whole thing
quickly took on the feel of some-
thing that would not meet deci-
sion easily, something bound for
closeness and hairiness.
The Tar Heels had discovered
they could drive, so drive they
did, to get to 34-32 a minute
before halftime and cause
Krzyzewski a timeout. RJ Davis
made a pull-up step-back. The
6-foot-4 guard Love made the
kind of drive into the redwoods
that screams fearlessness, and
then Manek tied the game at 34.
And then speaking of layups in
traffic, there went Duke’s Jeremy
Roach, his play becoming a
three-point play four seconds
before halftime.
Duke led 37-34 and quickly
41-34, but then out of the lighter
blue came a Tar Heels surge of
13-0 that wrought booming
cheers that seemed pregnant
with relief and loathing. Love,
returning to the shooting semi-
consciousness that makes him
alluring, sent a three from the
right of the top that nudged in.
He sent a three from the left that
drained in. Banchero missed
twice inside, and Manek went to
the right corner to turn around a
make a three that looked sure-
thing from release. North Caro-
lina got a turnover, and Love
drove the fast break to a layup.NCAA Tournament
felling Duke (32-7) to reach a
most unlikely national title game
with Kansas.
Emerging from the locker
room after a long spell inside
afterward, Krzyzewski reached
the interview dais and spoke of
how he hoped all his teams
would end up with “tears of joy
or tears of sorrow” because the
latter meant they cared. He said:
“They won 32 games, man. And
they turned it around in March.
They’ve been beautiful, beautiful
young men to coach.”
He said: “I’ve been blessed to
be in the arena, and when you’re
in the arena, you’re going to
come out feeling great or feeling
agony. But you always feel great
about being in the arena,” and,
“Damn, I was in the arena for a
long time.”
He spoke for the last postgame
time because North Carolina
won a game bloated with big-
ness, a game of excess in a city of
excess, a game that doubled as an
excuse to wet your shorts. It
began with two rivals of close
geographic proximity and high-
brow mutual contempt, as a
rivalry piled atop a coronation
piled atop a Final Four piled atopwill carry the sound of 70,602 in
the Superdome, and it will end
every time with eternal Duke
Coach Mike Krzyzewski walking
off one last time after an 81-77
loss to a bitterest rival.
Somehow, the nightmare will
note that that outcome is the
second Tar Heels win over Duke
within five Saturdays in spring
2022.
It will only tantalize in the
nightmare that Duke’s young
players soared in the pressure,
that Paolo Banchero scored
20 points with 10 rebounds, that
Trevor Keels outdid his recent
stuff for 19 points on 8-for-14
shooting. The ending will always
rest on North Carolina’s Arman-
do Bacot getting a whopping
21 rebounds, on Love’s 28 points,
on shots from RJ Davis and
Brady Manek.
At the end, just before the eyes
open, there will always be Tar
Heels raging to a mass in the
corner of the court, jumping
madly in joy. There will always be
the fact that Krzyzewski’s fare-
well tour ended with a grown-up
No. 8 seed North Carolina (29-9)
NORTH CAROLINA FROM D1
Heels send Blue Devils
and Krzyzewski packing
Outside shots clanged or worse.
People could, at least, make
dunks. In a mad land people had
paid large sums to see missed
shots, with the sums a factor in
the misses.
Duke spent the balance of the
half creating little shafts of light
for itself with leads of 24-18 and
34-28, and North Carolina spent
the same phase making up those
deficits with bold drives born of
the confidence found March 5 in
beating Duke at Duke to wreck
the Krzyzewski closing cer-
emony.
Krzyzewski coached rather
quietly from a stool, one levela trilogy this season. By the time
it finally started amid the kind of
noise that makes neck hairs sa-
lute, it had become the game in
which each shot seemed bigger
than a shot, each rebound
seemed an achievement and
each turnover seemed totally un-
derstandable.
It seemed reasonable to feel
scared of it.
So they combined to miss 13 of
their first 17 shots and 43 of their
first 71 by halftime. Nobody
could do too much of anything,
and nobody could blame them,
so it became a romping cavalcade
of missed shots, back and forth.DAVID J. PHILLIP/ASSOCIATED PRESS
North Carolina, which split two games against Duke in the regular
season, won the rivals’ first meeting in the NCAA tournament.clear: the other guys.
So with this NCAA
tournament meeting, something
brand new in a rivalry that’s so
old, consensus came with the
idea that digesting it all merely
made the stomach roil. The
numbers to consider are endless.
Over the past 45 seasons, the
rivals entered Saturday’s game
55-55 against each other. Their
total points in those 110
meetings: Duke 8,580, North
Carolina 8,579.
One point.
By halftime Saturday night, on
the strength of a twisting Jeremy
Roach drive on which he drew a
foul, Duke had extended that by
a minuscule margin: 8,617-8,613
over 41 / 2 decades, 37-34 in the
national semifinal.
And at the timeout with just
under eight minutes to go,
Carolina had both advantagesan otherwise underwhelming
year for Duke and was a dagger
for Carolina. Carolina came back
from eight points down with
17 seconds left — and no three-
point line — in 1974. Duke came
back from 17 down with less than
12 minutes left in 1998.
A true Carolina fan will still
bring up the season Krzyzewski
sat out with back issues — and
rail that Duke officials assigned
the Blue Devils’ 4-15 record
without their head coach to
assistant Pete Gaudet. A true
Duke fan wonders why, when
UNC was found to have given
credit for courses to students,
including many athletes, that
weren’t taught by instructors,
the NCAA didn’t issue a
sweeping punishment. Ask each
side which team the officials
perennially and eternally favor,
and the answer is swift andBARRY SVRLUGAUNC can savor this one
for a long, long time
GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESSDuke’s Mike Krzyzewski, left, greeted North Carolina’s Hubert Davis after the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils on Saturday night and ended the legendary coach’s career two wins short of a sixth national title.