Sometimes, all you can do is bury your head in a heap of nachos from The Dillo. The more queso, the better. Let that stuff drip off the side of the plate. It tastes good. And until the chips run out, at least, The Dillo will make you feel better. It might even force you to forget you just took a suckerpunch to the gut.
The Dillo, therefore, was my refuge Nov. 1 last year after the most wrenching Duke Football loss I've ever watched, and I've seen a lot of them. There was Miami in 2006, Navy in 2007 and Northwestern in 2008. There were blocked field goals and missed extra points, false starts and pass interferences, a heartbreaker to North Carolina one year and another the next. Duke wasn't good at much, but it often did come this close to winning-which means, in short, that the Blue Devils were extraordinary at losing. They lost like Florida won: with style, with panache, with a flair for the dramatic. If Tim Tebow is the mask with the smiley face, then Duke was the other one. You know. The one that looks sad.
That was me-woe was me!-after Duke lost in overtime at Wake Forest, a defeat that left me more shaken than usual. Nearly three years of watching Duke Football and countless more enduring Rutgers Football should have armed me, and if not, at least numbed me. It still stung. Don't remember? Go grab some Tostitos while I rewind the 33-30 loss, which, if flipped, would have given Duke a 5-3 record. Scoop some guac while you're up. It will help.
* 30-30, 3:14 left in the fourth. Twelve-yard completion. Fourteen-yard run. First down on 4th-and-2. Rush, rush, rush. Timeout. Two seconds left. Nick Maggio's game-winning field goal: wide right.
* 30-30, first overtime. Riley Skinner is rushed on 3rd-and-10 and hurls the ball off his back foot. Complete for a first down. Four plays later, the Demon Deacons score a field goal.
* 33-30, first overtime. Second play from scrimmage. Eron Riley is open in the end zone. Thaddeus Lewis aims for him. Aaron Smith steals the ball. Two inches higher, and an interception becomes a touchdown. Instead, it's another loss.
"Welcome back, Duke Football," a friend said as soon as Smith caught the pass intended for Riley, as soon as 5-3 became 4-4 and as soon as it became clear that David Cutcliffe wouldn't be going to a bowl in his first season. I couldn't fault him for making that connection. It was a classic Duke loss, shocking only because they had seemed so far in the past. After all, a win would have given the surging Blue Devils four chances to become bowl-eligible. Instead, they proceeded to lose to injuries first, and everyone else next.
"I just hate it for our kids that we can't find that next step to win a tough game like this," Cutcliffe said in Winston-Salem. "We've let two... get away from us where we had a chance to win at the end. Now we've just got to grow to the next level."
There's not much of a motto in there-nothing like "Play Like A Champion Today," and thank goodness for it-but the statement will define Cutcliffe's second year and, indeed, every season until Duke does make it to that next level.
While no single campaign is like any other, every one-no matter the length, no matter the location, no matter the sport-hinges on one particular occasion. Last year, it was the Wake Forest game, and, it was the field goal, the blitz gone awry, the interception. Duke lost before and lost after, but it was the loss to the Demon Deacons that changed its tenor and momentum. It was, ahem, the queso on the tortilla.
And somewhere on this year's schedule lurks another game like Wake Forest, a contest that will, at some point, prove whether the Blue Devils have grown to that so-called next level, an aspiration every team still has the right to harbor. It might be the first game of the year and it might be the last, but probably, it will be somewhere in the middle-sometime around November, when, as Cutcliffe liked to remind us last year, his team was defined. It was only cruel that Duke's tipping point landed on the first day of the month, sucking out the sweet promise from the rest of it.
I'm sure that taste of hope is scrumptious, though, even more so than oozing queso. I bet it lasts longer than 15 minutes, and I imagine it doesn't leave you wondering what empty feeling made you indulge in The Dillo in the first place.
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