WINSTON-SALEM - The scene looked eerily familiar to the Duke defense: Groves Stadium, an ACC victory almost within grasp and all that needed to be done was stopping Brian Kuklick and the Wake Forest passing attack.
Fred Goldsmith remembers, defensive stalwart Chris Combs remembers-neither cherished that memory.
"[The Wake game two years ago] was very impressed on my mind," Goldsmith said. "When we lost, it really knocked us for a loop and it took a long time to get things right since then."
Two years ago in the same stadium, the Blue Devils held a comfortable 16-3 lead against Wake Forest entering the fourth quarter, but Kuklick led the Demon Deacons on touchdown marches of 69 and 89 yards in the final period to give Wake a 17-16 win and drive in the penultimate nail in Duke's 0-11 campaign of 1996.
Skip forward two years, and Duke again has Wake in the corner. Duke clung to a 19-16 lead when the Deacons began their final possession at their own 19 with 1:48 on the clock and no timeouts.
Only this time, Duke delivered the knockout punch.
"I said to everybody [before Wake's final possession], 'It's not going to happen this time,'" Combs said. '"We're not going to let this happen, we have to go out there and make plays.' Everybody responded well and we stopped them."
Indeed, Wake Forest needed 81 yards for the go-ahead touchdown and probably about 50 yards to get into reasonable range for kicker Matthew Burdick.
The Deacons got all of 11 yards.
On the drive's first play, Kuklick was pressured out of the pocket and forced to scramble, but he didn't get far before Duke linebacker Lyle Burdine met him and caused Kuklick to fumble. Although guard Sam Settar fell on the fumble and Kuklick threw for a first down on the next play, it wasn't long before the Duke swarm got to Kuklick again.
Combs put a quick inside move on his blocker on the ensuing first-down play and pounced on Kuklick for a nine yard loss-Duke's fourth sack of the game.
"We had a tenacious pass rush all night long," Goldsmith said. "We mixed it up, between blitzing, bluffing blitzing. But you get that kind of pressure from [so many] guys, and that was the difference between this year's team and [past years].
"This is the first time we've had any depth on our defensive front since I've been at Duke. And we're able to keep bringing in very good players to rush the passer. Two years ago, we just gave out down here versus Kuklick, and I think we did last year."
The Duke defense had spent the last two weeks chasing two of the most athletic quarterbacks in the nation in Virginia's Aaron Brooks and Georgia Tech's Joe Hamilton. One could only imagine that a relatively immobile drop-back passer like Kuklick must have looked like he was wearing cement shoes to the Duke pass rush.
"We do some different things to try to contain the scramblers, but with Kuklick, we knew eventually we could get to him," Combs said. "We just had to play each play as hard as the one before, and just try to get off the blocks and get to him, hit him or whatever we have to do to disrupt the ball. But we got to him a few times tonight."
It was only fitting that the game's final meaningful play ended with Kuklick looking up at the Winston-Salem sky. On a fourth and four, tackle Nate Krill put a bull-rush on his blocker, leap-frogged over him and landed squarely on Kuklick. The sack capped a stellar defensive performance made even more amazing by the absence of senior nose tackle Eric Scanlan, who sat out with a bruised shoulder.
"Mike Steinbaugh did a tremendous job tonight [replacing Scanlan]," Combs said. "He's got some great ability, and he's shown that the past two years, but for him to finally come out here and start a game when we needed it and play the way he did-it was great for us."
Snapping the 21-game ACC losing streak, exorcising the ghosts of past failures and finding the defense that disappeared last weekend-it was great indeed.
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