Now, I'm not going to pretend like Duke hasn't had its fair share of success over the last four decades. I talked about my Yankees fandom, and how I never really was as invested in the team after that initial season (“Maybe that first season had been too perfect, and nothing could top it,” I wrote at the time). Championships are so meaningful precisely because of the difficulty involved as well as the fact that a lot of the times, the team that seems meant to win it all doesn’t get it done, no matter how close they get.ĭuring the spring of 2019, I wrote a speech for my freshman year seminar on sports fandom. All year the Blue Devils had arguably the most talented roster in the country, and after knifing through the West Region, they had only two wins standing in their way of one of the best stories in sports history-at that point, I just couldn’t process the fact that it was possible they wouldn’t finish the job.īut if championships were that easy-that the most talented team won every season, or that the team destined to win it all did in fact do so-then they wouldn’t mean as much. ![]() But to someone like me whose first real taste of being a true fan was the 2009 Yankees, it’s not that obvious. Winning a championship in sports is really hard. But there has to be some way to move on, and in the two weeks since that stunning defeat, I’ve latched onto one lesson: I’m not going to pretend like anything I discuss in the next 400 words makes up for that. Now I’ll preface the rest of this column with this: Virtually every single Duke fan would’ve rather Duke had won that game than lost it. ![]() With one Caleb Love three, what seemed to be culminating into a storybook ending turned into a Duke fan’s ultimate nightmare. It seemed too good to be true.Īs we all know, the Blue Devils lost the following weekend in excruciating fashion to their biggest rival, North Carolina. As I watched the Blue Devils take down Michigan State, Texas Tech and Arkansas on their way to the Final Four, it finally started to sink in: Duke may very well win the national championship, during Coach K’s final season as head coach. Similar to that 2009 Yankees campaign, this past Duke men’s basketball season seemed to be evolving into the ultimate storybook ending, especially considering how painfully the previous three seasons ended.
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