Duke fans are in pain.
To be upset in the NCAA Tournament is always agonizing. An upset loss with the game seemingly in hand hurts all the more. But to be upset in a game that was in your control on a miraculous buzzer beater that required so many things to go wrong in succession—both out of Duke’s control (a freshman making a nearly half-court 3 after an ice-cold shooting night) and in its control (Cayden Boozer’s panicked pass)—is arguably the most painful loss that Blue Devil fans have ever experienced.
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The context for Duke fans exacerbates the pain. Since the Blue Devils’ fifth national championship in 2015, Duke has been excruciatingly close to returning to that mountaintop over and over. The 2019 Blue Devils had arguably the best cohort of freshman talent in college basketball history, but injuries led to a disjointed year that was cut short in the Elite 8 by a late (but not quite buzzer-beating) shot. The 2020 team was rounding into form, and had a potentially all-time great story developing in the emergence of Justin Robinson, before the NCAA Tournament was cancelled. Mike Krzyzewski final team—well, we don’t need to rehash what happened in the 2022 Final Four. And now, in back-to-back years, Jon Scheyer’s Blue Devils have seen victory slip through their fingers late in March Madness.
Any one of those blows would be a generational heartbreak for most programs. Duke fans bear the burden of all of them over the last decade. Each one compounds the pain of its successors. Over the past decade, almost every season Duke enters March with legitimate National Championship aspirations. The Blue Devils scale the mountain before faltering at the peak, making each fall feel farther and farther.
But would Duke fans truly trade in that pain? Would the loud minority of Blue Devil “fans” (with those quotation marks doing heavy lifting) bashing Jon Scheyer and Cayden Boozer on social media be OK with multiple years between ACC titles? Or a half-decade between Sweet 16 appearances? Or a prolonged stretch of inferiority to our rivals in Chapel Hill?
I think not.
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The fact is that, in just four years, Scheyer has built a program that consistently competes for National Championships in an era of unprecedented chaos. Scheyer is one of just three coaches ever to have reached the Elite 8 three times before the age of forty. In his last 20 seasons at the helm Coach K never reached three straight Elite 8s, but Scheyer just did. Coach K never achieved back-to-back 35 win seasons like the last two Duke teams, either.
The pain Duke fans feel right now cannot be separated from the program’s historical excellence and Scheyer exceeding any reasonable expectations for the heir apparent to a legend (just ask those folks in Chapel Hill about their own experiences with such a transition). Yes, there are reasonable questions to be asked of Scheyer’s late-game strategy (although such questions overlook the late-game improvements his squad made over the course of a three loss campaign) and the reliance on freshman in clutch situations (although Arizona starts three freshmen just like Duke did in the tournament). But single-elimination tournaments are inherently prone to randomness, even more so because the actions of 18-24 year olds are especially volatile. The best team doesn’t always win, nor does the team that played the best on a given night.
There are plenty of ways Duke can and should work to minimize the odds of outlier events knocking them out of the NCAA Tournament. But they will never be zero. That unpredictability is part of any sports fandom and is especially apparent in college sports. In fact, Duke’s mystique was built upon it: the Laettner shot and the other buzzer beaters that came before it, the Miracle Minute plus the subsequent comeback over Maryland in the Final Four, and Gordon Hayward’s shot that “almost went in!”
Now Blue Devil fans are on the other side of a legendary event, and it hurts. It hurts more for being so close, and knowing the ecstasy awaiting atop the mountain. But National Championships are no one’s birthright. Duke fans are, in fact, exceptionally lucky to be legitimately competing for one each year—a position every (non-UConn) fanbase over the past decade would easily trade for. The pressure that comes with that competition is undoubtedly a privilege, as Billy Jean King famously said. But the pain is also a privilege. The pain means the Blue Devils had a memorable—in the last two seasons, historic—season. It means we had the joy of far more victories than defeats. It often means that banners will be raised to the rafters in Cameron.
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Duke fans are in pain. They will be for some time. But on the other side of that mourning there is perspective and there is joy. Then there will be the dawn of a new season, with another chance at glory alongside that of a new type of pain. That risk means the Blue Devils are competing once again for a National Championship. That pain is a privilege.
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