DURHAM, N.C. — Mike Krzyzewski’s three daughters were waiting for him when he made the long walk across the court holding his wife Mickie’s hand. They greeted him in front of the Duke bench, not in celebration but in unexpected consolation.
They hugged their father through barely restrained tears. Whatever this evening was supposed to be, this wasn’t it. The noise of North Carolina’s celebration still echoed amid the aged girders overhead. There was no joy in Cameron.
The Tar Heels had played the ultimate spoiler, ruining Krzyzewski’s grand Cameron sendoff, and if the building was stunned, well, Krzyzewski was irate. He walked to the microphone set up at center court. A fan called out, “We love you, coach!” He shook his head.
“I don’t love me right now,” Krzyzewski said. “This isn’t part of the program. This is impromptu by me. I’m sorry about this afternoon.”
Some fans broke the silence, calling out to contradict him. Krzyzewski shushed them.
“No, no, no, please be quiet. Today was unacceptable. But the season has been very acceptable. The season isn’t over, all right?”
They cheered that, but it was hard to shake the sense that something had gone very badly wrong. The score, North Carolina 94, Duke 81, had been wiped from the scoreboards, but the show would go on.
Krzyzewski’s message, to the fans and to his players who sat watching from the same bench where North Carolina had just sat in victory, was clear: There’s no way to rewrite this farewell. His team had been unable to send him out of Cameron on the right note. There’s only one way it can redeem itself now.
“It’s hard for me to believe this is over,” Krzyzewski would say later, in his (planned) remarks to the crowd, as he talked about his love for Duke and Durham and above all else, the family that surrounded him, his wife and daughters and grandchildren.
In a very real sense, this was the ultimate tribute from North Carolina, refusing to play into the narrative, unwilling to allow Krzyzewski an evening of ease and relaxation. The Tar Heels, unawed by the circumstances and playing as close to their full potential as they have all season, were determined to spoil the moment. Whatever their secondary role was supposed to be in this tribute to their most fervid rival, they refused to play it.
Duke was given nothing. If it wanted to ensure a happy ending to all of this home-court hagiography, the Tar Heels insisted Duke was going to have to take it out of their hands. Tyler Hansbrough made a career out of ruining Duke senior nights; Armando Bacot and R.J. Davis and Brady Manek and Caleb Love and Leaky Black — and only Bacot and Davis and Manek and Love and Black in the second half, an amazing feat on a night Cameron was so steamy even Krzyzewski shed his pullover at halftime — were determined to do the same for Krzyzewski on Saturday.
All five of Duke’s losses have come in games the Blue Devils have led in the second half, and Duke led with 10 minutes to go, the building luxuriated in a sense of inevitability.
As UNC ran its lead to eight in the final four minutes, and Duke missed shot after shot, Krzyzewski leaned back on the bench, his arms crossed. In her usual seat, Mickie sat stoically, her arms in almost the same position. The scores of former Duke players behind the home bench looked suddenly pensive, their faces blank as they shifted their weight from foot to foot.
Whatever ending they all had envisioned after all these years, this wasn’t it.
Instead of a triumphant bow to the crowd, Krzyzewski walked off amid stunned silence, his pace quick and gaze locked, some two and a half hours after he had arrived a conquering hero through a guard of honor composed of his past and current players, exchanging fist bumps and hugs as he worked his way through the line.
The names recalled the scope of his tenure as much as anything, from Jay Bilas and Kenny Dennard, to Grant Hill and Christian Laettner, to Shane Battier and Jay Williams, to J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams, to Quinn Cook and Kyle Singler, to Matt Jones and Grayson Allen. Some, even the most famous and rarely sighted among them, turned to face the crowd with their phones, a moment recorded from the inside.
As he reached center court, they all gathered behind him for a group photo, 42 years of Duke basketball in one frame, with Krzyzewski in the middle of it.
Duke basketball was here before Krzyzewski. It will be here after he is gone. But the ecosystem he created and nurtured and trained within Cameron, this supernova of passion and energy and noise contained only by these old Hillsborough bluestone walls, has existed and flourished precisely because of the gravitational force at its center.
Like the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, an entire constellation of basketball stars has revolved around Krzyzewski for four decades. While Duke’s season is far from over — it has no more than two losses left before that point — and this basketball galaxy will spin on of its own inertia and momentum, it will do so without the force that brought it together and has held it together — even when, at times, it was on the verge of falling apart.
In deep space, the universe is constantly expanding but our vision of it is limited by the speed of light. It takes light so long to travel interstellar distances that what we see represents not space but time. The deeper we look into space, the farther back we see. The deeper you looked at Krzyzewski on Saturday, the more of his past you could see.
“I didn’t think I would cry, but I did,” Krzyzewski said afterward. “But that’s all right. That’s all right.”
The look on his face as he walked through his former players, and then struggled to maintain his composure during the national anthem — that at-times cruel iron visage, so often frozen in a rictus of fury, softened like butter in the sun — told a thousand tales.
So too did all of the faces of these Duke players who made him a legend and he made legends in turn as time ticked away, as North Carolina couldn’t miss and shot after Duke shot clanged off the rim. More than a few of them knew the feeling of losing to the Tar Heels in Cameron on senior night. Now Krzyzewski would, too.
Afterward, after his unscheduled remarks and before his scheduled remarks, as a tribute video played, Krzyzewski wiped his eyes. Mickie took his hand. Krzyzewski tried to watch, but would again rest the bridge of his nose in his hand.
“It feels magical when we win,” Krzyzewski listened to himself say as he narrated the video, but the mood was anything but magical. He tried to pay attention to all of this, but he also couldn’t stop moving his fingers. This too was written on his face: Enough of this. There was coaching to be done.
