A sad State of mind

Perhaps because of the incessant radio ads reminding me that tickets were still available for N.C. State basketball games against Duke, I decided to go to last night's game.

Since State had been awful this year, and since Duke hadn't lost at the RBC Center since 2004, I figured it would be nice to see the Blue Devils' first road win of the season, and if I could classlessly taunt some State fans about the intellectual rigor of their Fashion and Textile Management major, so much the better. (The following majors are actually offered at N.C. State: Parks, Recreation and Tourism; Forest Management; Professional Golf Management; Textile Technology; Food Science; Poultry Science; and the bafflingly-named Science. Seriously, no one should ever say that the state of North Carolina does not afford its students ample opportunities to receive an education in whichever field interests them most.)

Needless to say, that's not what happened.

From the moment my friend and I got to the arena and paid $10 to park a 30-minute walk away from the front entrance, to the moment we got to our seats and realized we would literally be sitting as far away from the court as possible, to the two hours in which N.C. State seemingly could not miss a contested jump shot while Duke could not make an uncontested one, to the 15 million times the lady sitting next to me irritatingly imitated the already-irritating wolf howl that the RBC Center staff plays at the most random times, to the moment that my friend got hit by a car on the way out and referee Bernie Clinton still hit him with a blocking foul, almost nothing went right. In fact, I was tempted to agree with the text message my friend got with two minutes left in the game: "[Expletive] this [expletive] team. I'm [expletive] done with this [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] season."

I'm not sure what it felt like to watch the game on TV, but being at the game was almost a surreal experience. It reminded me of playing Madden 2001 with my brother on Playstation, in one of those games when he would just launch long passes and his receivers would invariably come down with them. I always figured his luck would run out at some point, but it never did. I spent most of the game waiting for State's luck to run out. After all, this was a team that had played nine games against major conference teams going into last night's game and had scored more than one point per possession in just three of them. There was no way they were throwing up 1.27 points per possession against a Duke team that had allowed more than a point per possession just three times all season. This was a team that had lost to Northwestern at home, no shot they'd beat the seventh-ranked team in the country.

I finally gave up on the game when, in back-to-back possessions with 13 minutes left, Kyle Singler missed an open three-pointer from the corner  and the Wolfpack's Scott Wood (who I'd call the pride of Warsaw, Ind., if not for the fact that the Plumlees are from there) drained a contested one. These two shots happened eight seconds apart. After Singler's shot hit the back rim, I said to my friend, "Not Duke's night," and as soon as the ball left Wood's hand, I said, "Really not Duke's night." When Javier Gonzalez hit the back-breaking three over Miles Plumlee at the end of the game and the crowd erupted and the lady next to me did her wolf howl, I wasn't even crushed. Of course it was going in; it was that kind of night.

And that's the thing. Sometimes a team just runs into a buzz-saw. State had a lot of dunks, and knocked down a lot of open shots, but they also hit a ton of difficult, contested shots. Duke had some trouble getting good shots, but they also missed a bunch of shots they always make. A large portion of any game is luck.

The usual post-loss, sky-is-falling complainers will make their usual post-loss, sky-is-falling complaints -- let's recite in order: we need to schedule more out-of-conference road games; we need to hire a real big-man coach; we need to recruit more athletes; Ryan Kelly/Andre Dawkins/Olek Czyz/Marty Pocius needs to play more; Shavlik Randolph/Lance Thomas/Brian Zoubek needs to play less; we can't handle athletic power forwards; we can't handle quick penetrating guards -- but none reasons of those are why Duke lost last night. The Blue Devils lost because they ran into a buzz-saw -- one that shot 58% and didn't turn the ball over.