NEW ORLEANS — The noise came from the opposite corner of the court, like a jet engine roaring behind Mike Krzyzewski as he walked away from it. In this moment, he was surrounded by tens of thousands, but very much alone.
He had waited for the North Carolina players and coaches to gather themselves before moving toward them, and spoke at length to several of them, but now that was over, and they went dancing back toward their fans, overflowing with joy as Krzyzewski walked the other direction, for the last time.
This was the end of so many things: Duke’s season, a legendary career, and suddenly, this rivalry as we knew it.
It had been put to the test in the electric heat of a basketball blast furnace, somehow exceeded all expectations, and produced an earth-shaking conclusion.
Whatever this once was, whatever it has been, it no longer is. And not just because Krzyzewski is gone, although for four decades, first against Dean Smith and then against his lineage of successors that reached Hubert Davis this season, Krzyzewski was either the protagonist or the antagonist, depending on perspective.
But also because North Carolina now has the ultimate bragging rights, unquestioned and unconquered. Twice, the Tar Heels denied Krzyzewski his ultimate rewards.
They ruined his home send-off. They’ll play Kansas for a national title on the second day of Krzyzewski’s retirement. That’s it. That’s everything. That’s all of it. North Carolina wins, not just Saturday, 81-77, but forever.
The rivalry will go on, in some new shape and form, but what existed before this game has been completed. It reached an end point Saturday night in what might have been the greatest game they’ve played against each other, one of the best games ever played in the Final Four by anyone against anyone, in front of God and the governor and everyone.
It was a gift. We rarely, in our lives, witness something that manages to exceed the highest of expectations the way this did: a game that transcended all of its circumstances and became a work of living art.
A game that somehow made a cavernous dome feel like a basketball gym as two teams, knowing each other as well as they knew themselves, endured the wildest swings of emotions imaginable, lifetimes hanging in the balance until the final minute, into the final seconds.
That only served to raise the stakes to almost impossible levels. Somehow, the thought of losing this game, after everything that went into it and everything it delivered, became unimaginable. And both teams, down the stretch, could taste victory and sense defeat.
But Mark Williams missed two free throws with 46 seconds to go that would have put Duke into the lead — it would have been the 19th time the lead changed hands Saturday — and North Carolina never looked back.
Caleb Love, the mercurial no-mercy Tar Heels shooter, went down to the other end and hit a 3-pointer, over Williams’ outstretched arm, and that finally settled unsettleable matters.
“The winner was going to be joyous and the loser was going to be in agony,” Krzyzewski said. “That’s the type of game we expected. We would have liked to have been on the other side of it. But I’m proud of what my guys have done.”
Over the course of his career, Krzyzewski always thought of himself as more than a basketball coach. A teacher, to be sure, but also an executive, a thought leader, a commanding officer.
His West Point days were never far from his heart; only his wedding ring came before his class ring, with a Duke stone later added to it.
He referenced his military training in June when he talked about the importance of having a succession plan for command, and how that influenced the transition to Jon Scheyer.
He referenced those days again in San Francisco, when Paolo Banchero was asked about the influence his mother, who exited Washington as the school’s all-time leading scorer, had on him.
“All he is and all he ever hopes to be is a result of his mother,” Krzyzewski interjected, before Banchero could answer. The coach chuckled to himself as a baffled audience stared back. “It’s a West Point thing. You have to say it about your squad leader.”
The World War II hero Douglas MacArthur made the old British Army song about old soldiers famous in his address to a joint session of Congress after he was relieved of his command in Korea.
Krzyzewski has resigned this particular commission of his own accord, but the same sentiment applies given his legacy, his accomplishments, his belief in the primacy of leadership as a skill, as a talent, as a power.
Old soldiers never die, They simply fade away.
Krzyzewski walked off the battlefield of the basketball court for the final time Saturday night, one game short of his ultimate goal after 1,571 of them, walking away from the game after 47 years as a coach.
He returned to the Duke locker room after completing his postgame responsibilities, slipped through the door alongside his wife Mickie, and faded away.
Only moments earlier, across the hallway, North Carolina’s double-double machine Armando Bacot had been sitting in a folding chair, awaiting the golf cart that would take him and his newly balky ankle — he twisted it late in the game and was helped to the bench, only to return in the late minutes — to the team bus.
Davis and his assistant coaches had filed out some time ago, still almost bouncing in their giddiness. Bacot and a trainer were left behind.
Bacot paged through his phone, answering a few of the more than 200 text messages he had received in the hour or so after the game. North Carolina’s celebration had raged on and on in front of their fans and both Roys, Cooper and Williams, until they finally tumbled down the steps from the raised court on their way to the locker room.
As he exited public view, Leaky Black – long-suffering Leaky Black – had been overcome with emotion, burying his face in his jersey as Love and RJ Davis enveloped him in hugs. At that moment, Krzyzewski was done, and North Carolina was still alive, somehow.
A team that had lost to Wake Forest by 22, that lost to Pittsburgh only six weeks ago, had vanquished both its rival and the rivalry itself on its way to play for a national title. “I don’t know if it was belief or it was just us being delusional,” Bacot had said, moments earlier.
“At every point of the season, we knew if we came together as a team that we can get to the championship, and we did.” Suddenly, that was less than 48 hours away. A manager grabbed Bacot’s bag and he stood up and moved slowly toward the cart.
Down the same hallway that Krzyzewski would soon ride for the last time as a coach, Bacot limped forward toward the national championship game and into a basketball world that would never be the same.
