CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. - As the first half concluded, the Boston College students screamed in celebration, the Eagles walked off with a swagger in their step and No. 6 Duke left looking a little shell-shocked.
Based on the atmosphere inside Silvio O. Conte Forum, you would have never known that the Blue Devils were actually up by five.
And that's because just two minutes and 21 seconds earlier, Duke had run its way to a 37-24 lead and looked to have recovered from a tough loss to North Carolina four days before.
Instead, Boston College carried the energy of that late first half swing into the second period and changed the entire complexion of the game in the process.
"They are good and have one of the best players [Tyrese Rice] in the country, so you can't let them have the momentum so easily after working so hard for 18 minutes," head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "All of a sudden, something went wrong and they hit shots and we didn't hit shots. We had some open shots that we didn't hit."
Rice, one of the top point guards in the country, sparked the Eagles for the majority of that brief stretch. After Tyler Roche nailed a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 10, the senior guard took over the game as he swished a pull-up trey with a minute left in the half to bring the game to within single digits.
After snaring the ensuing rebound off Nolan Smith's second missed three of Duke's possession, Rice hit a running jumper to get the lead down to five. Henderson failed to convert his own downtown shot as time expired, and the crowd erupted with renewed life.
Including the 8-0 run, Boston College outscored the Blue Devils 56-37 over the final 22 minutes of the contest.
Rice's play was something of a letdown after the first 18 minutes, when an effective trapping defense kept the ball out of his hands. He only had one other basket up to that point and spent more time trying to get open without the ball than create with it. Even before he crossed halfcourt, two Blue Devils hounded him and forced him to give it up.
"We kind of let up," junior forward Gerald Henderson said. "[Rice] felt like he needed to do something for them to win. He's obviously their best player, so they needed him to get going."
Although keeping Rice down for an entire 40 minutes was an impossible task for the Blue Devils and probably would have been for any team, had Duke managed to keep the Eagles down by double-digit points, it could have been the Blue Devils that carried a swagger in their step to the locker rooms to the tune of the best road noise of all: silence.
Instead, the Eagles' shooting percentage in the second half actually increased to 59.3 percent from the 58.3 percent clip they had in the opening period. The five-point lead was the largest it would ever be for Duke in the second period, as Boston College slowly chipped away until it began padding its own lead.
Making the loss especially disappointing was the fact that the team had played a great week of practice and shot out of the gate with the confidence from those practices as well as it could have, Krzyzewski said.
"You don't win close games by making those mistakes," he said. "The thing we have to do more of is get tough-minded. Our team has lost its edge a little bit."
As its second straight defeat showed, it doesn't take much of a loss mentally to lose the actual game.
Eighteen minutes of solid basketball was undone in a mere 2:21.
And with that, the last 20 minutes became Boston College's to lose-which, unlike Duke, it did not.
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