NEW ORLEANS — It was a mostly quiet and gray Wednesday afternoon along Bourbon Street, the calm before the storm. No crowds packing the street between the sidewalks, at least not yet. No lines to get into the music joints or the bars, and plenty of room in the places where they sell mango Daiquiris and cocktails and beer and pizza and street food under neon signs near street corners.
New Orleans remains one of America’s great party cities, and amid the peace on Wednesday was the sense, nonetheless, that something big is brewing. Bigger than Mardi Gras, even? Why not. The Final Four is back in this town for the first time since 2012, and it is not a foursome for the faint of heart, what with traditional powers Kansas and Villanova and, yes, Duke and North Carolina.
The teams made their way here throughout the past two days, with Duke arriving first, on Tuesday, followed by the others on Wednesday. This is not a small city and yet, in a way it can feel small, the action in the French Quarter self-contained, and not too far from the Superdome, which this weekend will become the epicenter of American sport.
Already this event has the feel that it could become one of the great Final Fours in history and we’re still more than two full days away from the first national semifinal, between the Jayhawks and Wildcats. The winner there will advance to play either Duke or North Carolina, with Duke seeking to send Mike Krzyzewski out with his sixth national championship and UNC seeking its seventh NCAA title, and second in the past five years.
All of which is to say Bourbon Street is sure to be a mass of humanity Saturday night after the semifinals, late into the evening, full of the revelers celebrating and the heartbroken medicating their pain with bourbon or beer or some sort of frozen sugary concoction swirling away in a hypnotic plastic kaleidoscope, a pastel-colored hangover. Oh, and there will be beads, too. Plenty of beads.
The shops along Bourbon Street are well stocked. If they run out, the vendors on the corners won’t.
Earlier this week, Krzyzewski considered the significance of Duke and UNC’s first-ever meeting in the Final Four (and the NCAA tournament, for that matter) and the more he thought about it the more he believed the entire foursome made this gathering particularly special. That, or perhaps he was deflecting attention away from the Duke-UNC game, which is the dominant storyline.
“It’s significant that four of these teams that have been four of the winningest teams in college basketball, to be under one roof,” Krzyzewski said. “And the team and the program that Jay (Wright) has had at Villanova, which in the last five, six years has been the leader, so to speak, in accomplishment. So that’s an amazing thing.”
In New Orleans, all four teams are staying in the same neighborhood, their hotels within walking distance. Duke and North Carolina are about three blocks apart. North Carolina and Villanova are practically next door neighbors, their hotels on opposite sides of Canal Street. All four teams are near the heart of the French Quarter, which is sure to become more lively as the week goes on.
At the UNC team hotel Wednesday night, a small but lively crowd created a party-like atmosphere when the Tar Heels arrived after about a two-hour delay. UNC was late arriving to the airport to fly out and then spent about 45 minutes in a holding pattern while bad weather blew through New Orleans — a literal storm that had been brewing all day.
“I’m a nervous flyer,” Hubert Davis, UNC’s first-year head coach, said after he stepped off one of three buses that carried the Tar Heels and their traveling party. “I saw the lightning coming out of the window, and I’m glad that we went the other direction.”
Now here, Davis said he felt “so excited for our players.”
“It’s been a year of hard work, a year of perseverance and resiliency,” he said, and now the season would end, one way or another, here in New Orleans. The city has been kind to the Tar Heels, who won the 1982 and ‘93 national championships here, in the Superdome, the same building where UNC will play against Duke on Saturday night in the second national semifinal.
This place has always been considered one of the best Final Four cities in the sport, along with Indianapolis; it’s a place that embraces the event, one where the soul of the city and the soul of the sport seem to feed off each other and create an energy. It wasn’t all there Wednesday, a day of travel and arrivals and anticipation, but the energy was building.
By the end of the day every team had arrived. Bourbon Street was still quiet, but it wouldn’t be for long. The Superdome was empty but it’d soon be full. The first back-to-normal Final Four since 2019, after two year of pandemic-related disruptions, was upon us. The party was about to start.
Final Four: UNC vs. Duke
▪ When: 8:49 p.m. ET, Saturday
▪ Where: Superdome, New Orleans
▪ TV: TBS
