Matthew Osborne
I love March Madness, but this year was the first time I have actually felt something during these three magical weeks in a while.
I grew up a Duke fan – OK, get it all out of you. No, I don’t root for the Cowboys, Yankees and Lakers, too. (Actually, I used to root for the Lakers but that is another story.)
Anyway, my family all hated Duke, too, and maybe that’s why I rebelled. But my childhood basketball hero was Christian Laettner, and I will hear no arguments that he was not the best college basketball player of the 64-team tournament era.
I went to George Washington, where we used to have a decent, competitive basketball team that distracted me from my childhood crush on the Dukies. In fact, I attended an NCAA second-round game in 2006 where GW faced off with Duke with predictable results, and I left the arena sad.
By that year, I had given up rooting for Duke. I even wrote a manifesto about it (sorry, can’t quote much of that here) and renounced my blue and white, seemingly for good. Part of the reasoning was a family conflict over Duke basketball that came at the same time as a family tragedy, which put some of the stupidity of arguing over basketball into perspective.
But three things happened in recent years.
First, GW’s basketball program is in the toilet and has been since we won the NIT in 2016, which was literally the last moment I had fun watching them. It has been a source of pride for many years for our alumni that has been driven into the ground by poor coaching and bad management by our athletic department.
Second, my father seems to have softened his immovable stance on Duke, making it possible for us to have objective conversations about their games. (He still hates the Cowboys, Lakers and Yankees, as do I now, so we agree there, too.)
Finally, this Mike Krzyzewski farewell thing hit me harder than I thought it would.
I really did grow up on Coach K, and those Duke teams are burned into my memory. I hung on every basket and I can tell you exactly where I was when I saw dozens of games from 1989-94, even though I cannot recall some events of yesterday.
I have honestly felt nothing for Duke either way for about 17 years – save for Zion, I pulled for him because he was just fun – until late this season, when it hit me that K was about to be done for good.
It’s the end of an era that encompasses my entire lifetime, and I could not help get behind Duke one more time.
Monday marked 30 years to the day from the Laettner miracle shot that sent Duke to the Final Four in 1992. With 2.1 seconds left, Kentucky’s Sean Woods hit an equally-tough shot to give Kentucky the lead. I was watching the game with my parents when the phone rang.
It was my cousin Scot, who wanted to taunt me that Duke was done. Back then, you had to call someone long distance if you wanted to taunt them from Ohio to Florida, so this was clearly an approved communication by my Uncle Mike, who also hates Duke.
So I am sitting on the edge of the bed with the phone cord nearly stretched to its limit when Grant Hill took the ball and fired it downcourt to Laettner.
Catch. Dribble. Turn. Shoot. Swish.
I fell off the bed and yelled out with joy, pulling the phone off the table, while Scot simultaneously yelled out in horror and disgust. (We all got live TV at the same time back then, too. Today I would have been streaming and our screams would have been separated by 30 seconds.)
I texted Scot on Monday and wished him a happy “called-me-too-soon” anniversary. He replied that it had been a quick 30 years. Darn, if that isn’t the truth.
The memories have been flooding back with this Coach K goodbye tour, and this has been a fun team to watch in the tournament so far on top of it. Just seeing Coach K smiling more and being more demonstrative shows me that he appreciates the moment he is in right now, something that is tough for all of us to achieve in our own lives.
So I don’t know if it will last, but for one more weekend, let’s go Duke.
Matthew Osborne is the editor of The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or editor@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.