Beyond the Arc: The Hangover - UNC

I knew if I didn’t write about this immediately following the game, I wouldn’t want to return to it. But, here goes (oh, and bear with the indulgent and whiny selfishness).

Wednesday night’s loss to North Carolina was as difficult to digest as any in my Duke tenure—worse than LSU or VCU, right there with West Virginia. It was the kind of loss that makes you question your sports worldview, challenging whether your dedication to a team will ever be repaid. After the game, my friend turned to me and said, “I don’t even know why I watch sports anymore. My teams never win anything.” And that’s coming from someone whose “teams” are the Yankees and Duke Basketball. It’s been a weird half-decade.

But every fan experiences those kinds of losses. As a Giants’ fan, it was the 39-38 playoff collapse against the 49ers in January 2003. As a Mets’ fan, it’s been the last three autumns. The former pain was repaid with a Super Bowl win over the Patriots; I’m waiting on the latter.

The problem with Duke, however, is the finiteness of my fan experience (surprisingly, "finity" and/or "finitude" are not the noun form of "finite"). Rooting for your college isn’t like rooting for a professional team; you have four years, and after that, you will never root as much for that team. This isn’t to say that I won’t be rooting for Duke next year; if and when the Blue Devils finally beat North Carolina at Cameron, I will be happy. It’s just that the magnitude of that happiness will pale in comparison to what it would have been Wednesday night, bonfire or not.

The same is true for how far this team goes in March and please-please-please April. It’s an increasingly distinct possibility that I will be a part of the second consecutive class to graduate without witnessing a Final Four—but just the third class in the last 23 years. And so the question becomes: Will I get repaid for my dedication to this team? Or will, when I confidently reveal my alma mater to colleagues in the future and they nod their head in excitement and ask how many Final Fours I got to see, I have to shuffle my feet awkwardly, look down, and say, “Well, the thing about that is…”.

And that’s why Wednesday night was so depressing. It wasn’t that Duke lost to North Carolina; it’s that Duke lost to North Carolina at Cameron all four of my years on this campus. And it was Mike Krzyzewski’s all-too-accurate assertion after the game that Carolina is just better than the Blue Devils right now. Even after playing lights-out basketball for 20 minutes, Duke still lost by 14. That’s what makes it so difficult to see this team hanging with the Carolinas and the UConns and the Pitts when it comes tournament time.

Now let’s go throttle Boston College.