Saturday was always going to be different, a new day, as clean a slate as there can ever be when North Carolina visits Duke or vice versa.
That was going to be true no matter what happened last March and April, the void left by two gigantic personalities exiting stage left. So much of what this rivalry is now — or what it was — came from the collision of two coaches who couldn’t see the common ground on which they actually stood even as they fought over it.
And while the roots run so much deeper, back to Art Heyman and Larry Brown and beyond, to sociological and even political forces that go far beyond basketball — public vs. private, just to start — so much of what’s visible above the ground these days bloomed and flowered when Dean Smith was a titan and Mike Krzyzewski was an upstart who would one day occupy that position.
That eternal struggle took place during college basketball’s greatest era, during the rise of ESPN, and all of that spun together in a whirlpool of intensity and fury and occasionally blood. That era is over now, as is that phase of the rivalry, which was going to last as long as Krzyzewski and Roy Williams were both around.
Even if what happened last spring hadn’t happened, Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer couldn’t perpetuate that, as hard as their assistants seem to have tried, given the flare-ups after the past two games. They’re products of it. They were raised in it. Their new version of it is always going to be a synthesis of past and present. We, and they, are still figuring out what that’s going to be.
We’ve seen twists and turns before, ebbs and flows. When Harrison Barnes chose UNC over Duke and the Tar Heels won the national title in 2009 and Duke’s Final Four drought reached four years — “they’re better than we are,” Krzyzewski was forced to admit — surely North Carolina had assumed some position of permanent preeminence.
A year later, Duke lifted the trophy and UNC missed the NCAA Tournament for the second time in nine years. They’d both win another in the next seven years. Order had been restored. The universe may always lean toward chaos, but the rivalry has always had its own equilibrium.
But what happened last spring was different, because of the new era in Chapel Hill, the end of another in Durham. There was so much riding on Krzyzewski’s last game at Cameron and the long-awaited, long-feared Final Four cage match that things couldn’t stay the same as they were, no matter what happened.
That doesn’t mean the rivalry is over for good, or that UNC “won,” even as something unquestionably changed. It means that we’ve entered a new cycle, a new epoch, just as things changed when Krzyzewski arrived and just as they changed when Smith retired. Just as they changed as Williams restored North Carolina’s proper place in the basketball world, paleozoic to mesozoic to cenozoic.
The rivalry will always exist, a thing in and of itself, independent of whatever’s happening in the world around it. But what it looks like, what form that takes, how it manifests itself, is a product of the people and the players and the times, directed by forces both internal and external.
And what that will be now, no one knows. Only that it isn’t the same.
