SYRACUSE, N.Y. - They had the shots.
Five times in the last four minutes, the Blue Devils got good looks at the basket from behind the three-point line. Five times, they missed.
These were the shots Duke nailed all year. The top-seeded Blue Devils made 39 percent of their long-range attempts, best in the ACC and 12th in the nation. So when Florida switched to a zone trailing by four with just over three minutes to go, Mike Krzyzewski wasn't complaining.
But one miss turned into another and another, until the fifth-seeded Gators owned a 13-0 game-ending run and an 87-78 Sweet 16 victory Friday night.
As both Shane Battier and Jason Williams said afterwards, that's basketball. Sometimes luck determines the final score as much as skill. Sometimes the ball refuses to find the bottom of the net.
But maybe fatigue doomed Duke and its short bench, which seemed shorter than usual with Mike Dunleavy once again struggling. Maybe the Blue Devils' legs had left them by the time they launched those ill-fated shots.
"I think we are worn out," Krzyzewski admitted.
In those final minutes, all Duke could do was try to find open looks and hope they went in. But with their play earlier in the game, the Blue Devils put themselves in a position where luck and fatigue could determine whether they advanced or went home.
For the fifth straight game, Duke got off to a slow start, trailing by seven at halftime. Two Sundays ago, the Blue Devils needed an errant pass and an open three that bounced off the rim to squeak by eighth-seeded Kansas in the second round. They'd survived close calls all year long, winning their last four overtime contests and going 9-4 in games decided by 10 points or less.
But on the night its season came to an end, Duke couldn't escape its first-half mistakes.
The Blue Devils committed 12 turnovers in the opening 20 minutes and allowed the Gators to hit half their field goals. Duke scored just 33 first-half points, its second-lowest output of the year. Battier attempted all of two field goals.
"We weren't playing with great intensity," Williams said. "In the second half, we picked up the intensity a lot more."
After three early turnovers, Duke settled down and led 13-9 almost five minutes in. But then the Blue Devils let Brett Nelson get open behind the arc.
They knew about the sharpshooting freshman and the four treys he hit off the bench in the second round. Yet Nelson broke free to kick off a run of 11 unanswered points in less than 90 seconds, all from long range and eight by the guard.
Duke also knew about Florida's vaunted press. Though the Blue Devils attacked it to varying degrees of success Friday, they turned the ball over twice in three possessions during the spurt. Their sloppiness and poor perimeter defense let the Gators build a 20-13 advantage.
It would take Duke 13 minutes to catch back up. It would take another six-and-a-half for the Blue Devils to earn their first lead since early in the first half. By then, 12:27 remained and the confident Gators weren't ready to fold.
All week long, Duke's players heard about the matchup between their lack of depth and Florida's press. If fatigue caught up with the Blue Devils, though, it was as much mental as physical. They had to expend all that energy, all that emotion, just to even the score.
"They did throw a lot of guys at us, but it wasn't a factor," Chris Carrawell said. "They just made the plays down the stretch. For us to come back from being down seven at halftime, to fight the way we did is a testament to our team. We're competitive, and we didn't go down without a fight."
But that fight took its toll. Florida coach Billy Donovan, well aware of Duke's usual accuracy from the perimeter, said he wanted to wait as long as possible before switching to a zone.
"We hoped we had fatigued them enough," he said.
Apparently they had.
It didn't help the Blue Devils that sixth man Dunleavy was coming back from mononucleosis and had four points and four turnovers. It didn't help that seventh man Matt Christensen missed the previous two games with a concussion and failed to pull down a rebound. It didn't help that Carlos Boozer fouled out for only the third time all season.
These aren't excuses, just all the more reason Duke couldn't afford to risk falling behind. Krzyzewski called the deep Gators' frenetic, pressing style key to upsetting the shorthanded Blue Devils. In the same breath, though, he reminded everyone that his team had somehow avoided the pitfalls of fatigue most of the season.
"We've been tired at the end of a lot of games because we've played six people," he said. "So we've been accustomed to playing tired."
But Friday, all those wins on tired legs couldn't make the ball go through the hoop.
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