DURHAM, N.C. — Leonard Hamilton got a hug. Mike Krzyzewski had kind words for Florida State’s Wyatt Wilkes and, later down the line, for all of the Seminoles’ many injured stars. Then he turned to his left and started walking across the floor, head down as he crossed the free-throw lane.
Six hundred and forty-four times before he had made some variation of that walk across the Cameron floor, after wins and losses, certainly far more of the former than the latter, and this was, inexorably and unavoidably, the last.
The end has arrived, the final finalities of Krzyzewski’s 42 years at Duke, and after the next game he coaches at Cameron there will be no walk back to the locker room. There will be speeches and honorifics and a grand encomium at the distant end of a record-breaking career. Saturday was the last home game he’ll coach at Duke that felt anything close to normal and routine.
