Midafternoon, about five hours before tip-off, I am returning to my hotel, the Don CeSar, that pile of pink turrets on the beach. The parking lot is closed to all but Duke fans.
I ask why.
“For the victory celebration,” I am told and am directed to park my car wherever I may find an empty spot on cluttered and outsider-resentful Pass-a-Grille.
Inside the lobby, a heap of welcome leaflets awaits. Superimposed on the Final Four logo is the Duke mascot, the masked demon who has stuck a fork in a flaming basketball. “Well Done” says the flier. “NCAA Champions. Duke Blue Devils.”
The sun is still high and warm over a large white tent erected on the beach behind the hotel. It is already abuzz with old and young Dookies, ignoring the sand in their loafers. A band plays the school song over and over, but it’s probably the first time for “Hail to the Blue and White” on a steel drum. An empty pedestal is reserved. For what, I ask.
“The winners’ trophy,” I am told.
Talk about your premature exaltation.
Someone forgot to let Connecticut in on the party plans. Later in the evening, across Boca Ciega Bay, up the interstate, in crooked barn of a building, the other No. 1 college basketball team ruined a perfectly smug little party by astonishing the darling Dukes 77-74.
“I think the Duke fans couldn’t believe it,” UConn guard Khalid El-Amin said. “I looked in their faces. And they were shocked.”
This is an upset everywhere but Connecticut, which means everywhere. This is not NC State over Houston-size upset, not Villanova over Georgetown, not even Duke over UNLV. This was a triumph of the unconvinced over the unbeatable, but still so impressed were UConn’s fans that they were not holding up single fingers and shouting “We’re No. 1” but rather, “We beat Duke! We beat Duke!”
“We didn’t shock,” coach Jim Calhoun said. “This was no shock to us. We truly believed.”
This was seat-gripping, breath-stealing basketball from front to finish, two teams grasping for victory rather than trying not to lose. And yet the single most-remembered play will be Duke star Trajan Langdon traveling with the ball as he had a chance to score the winning basket.
Revenge may not be best served cold but it is best served later, in the national final rather than in the regional final.
Instead of Duke hitting the winning shot–as Christian Laettner did to beat UConn in ’90 and keep the Huskies out of the Final Four–Duke never got off the winning shot.
“The ball was in the hands of our best player with a chance to win,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “It was exactly where it should have been. That’s where it would be again.”
“I started to make my move,” Langdon said. “I might have traveled, I might have not. That’s the way it goes.”
Ricky Moore, the UConn defender saw it just a bit differently.
“The last play of the game, him against me,” Moore said. “I’m going to win.”
UConn seemed to have picked a year to be great when one team was greater. Another season, another decade, and UConn is being mentioned with the best ever. Only four teams in the 1990s made the Final Four with two or fewer losses and Duke and UConn are two of them.
Connecticut always gave itself the chance, and what a nice little story it makes, not to mention that it is certainly more appreciated by those ardent Yankees. Wicked cool is how they would say it in New England, if any of the important players were from New England.
“We put smiles on our coaches faces, on our fans in Connecticut’s faces,” MVP Richard Hamilton said, “and on ours.”
The first of anything is always the most priceless, the most precious. To Connecticut it was certification; to Duke it was inventory.
Duke is overrun with these things, already two national titles under Krzyzewski, eight Final Four appearances, on track to be certified as the program of the ’90s, certainly the bookends of the ’90s.
This is where they came in, upsetting UNLV in ’91, defending in ’92, and this is where they planned to go out, with the greatest record of any Duke team, and just the barest lapse in between.
On a parallel path just beneath was none other than UConn, probably the failures of the ’90s, always a champion in progress.
Never was a team more ready for joy than this one.
“It’s a dream we get to live out,” UConn forward Kevin Freeman had said, his eyes actually misting. “We have 40 minutes to live out the dream.”
“The one thing about the NCAA tournament,” Krzyzewski said, “if you win, you end a program’s dream that year. And the fans’ dream.”
This is what Connecticut knew of endings. It took Calhoun 27 years to get the chance to play one game for everything. Every dream ended early, every memory was gloomy.
“One moment you’re in the parade and then, suddenly, it leaves without you,” Calhoun said, “and you are left to sweep up.”
Somebody else’s broom now.
“If you hear a lot of loud yelling tonight,” Calhoun said, “it will be me.”
