A story guarantees greatest Duke basketball season in history
By Matt Giles
Happy Duke basketball tears
What happened in 1991? National champs, two days after exacting revenge on a UNLV program that hadn’t lost in more than a year. 1992? Back-to-back champs.
A Duke basketball dynasty. A bonafide blueblood powerhouse. A ridiculous amount of hate from jealous outsiders.
Following humbling L’s in the 1994 and 1999 title games, Mike Krzyzewski and his fellas brought home the goods again in 2001 via more Final Four magic.
In 2004, a Final Four trip came up a bit short.
Yet six years after that, the Blue Devils — who were all the equivalent of little brothers in my then-29-year-old eyes — again took scissors to April nets, thanks in large part to an insanely trustworthy senior guard named Jon Scheyer acting as an extension of Coach K on the court.
Fast forward five more years to 2015. Yup, it happened once more, but this time with Scheyer in the role of assistant under his mentor.
And so that marked the fifth title since Dad had tried to initially flatline my lifelong Duke basketball expectations roughly 28 years beforehand.
True, this particular type of pure joy hasn’t arrived again ever since. In fact, the Blue Devils haven’t even been back to the Final Four.
Shame on Krzyzewski for that, right? Wrong.
Yes, even if the 74-year-old Hall of Famer goes winless next season in what will be his farewell tour before Scheyer takes the reins, non-bandwagon Duke basketball fans — no matter their current age — surely have plenty to credit him for in their own individual lives…