Krzyzewski and Williams are still college basketball’s best. Enjoy them while you can.

Someday we may recall the late twenty-teens as the dawn of the Kevin Keatts era, a return of N.C. State basketball to prominence it enjoyed while winning eight of the ACC’s first 21 championships.

For now, though, two coaches directing supremely successful programs within each other’s shadows command our attention. Appreciation is due. And the opportunity is time-limited, expiration date unknown -- even to some extend by Mike Krzyzewski, in his 39th season at Duke, and Roy Williams, in his 16th at North Carolina.

Williams, 68, and Krzyzewski, 71, remain at the height of their prowess. Each has won a pair of NCAA championships within the past decade and under varied circumstances. The Triangle veterans have combined to win eight national championships, reached 21 Final Fours, and made a hefty 62 NCAA appearances. Eight of the last 15 Final Fours, 12 of the last 20, have seen either Krzyzewski or Williams with a team in the field.

Among active coaches, at age 44 Krzyzewski was the youngest to win an NCAA championship in 1991. Williams racked up some of his numbers, though not a title, at Kansas, still a touchstone for him on occasion.

Krzyzewski is working on a run of 23 straight NCAA trips, tying Williams’ mentor, Dean Smith, for the most ever. The Duke coach already matched UCLA’s John Wooden with 12 Final Four berths. Williams was stopped at 20 consecutive NCAA appearances in 2009 and started a new, ongoing run in 2011.

‘Fire in the belly’

Sustaining that level of excellence has become the norm, leaving us in danger of taking it for granted, just part of the landscape. Big mistake. Krzyzewski and Williams separately and, for our delectation in North Carolina, collectively, remain on an epic journey.

The last time each took a squad to an NCAA title – Krzyzewski in 2015 and Williams in 2017 -- they were the second- and third-oldest coaches ever to do so. Like vintage autos, both recently underwent repairs and had parts replaced. This fall both proclaim they feel the best they have in years.

“I still think there’s quite a bit of fire in the belly,” Williams, dressed in tie and sports jacket, told media members earlier this month. “I love what I’m doing. I love trying to get all of (the) guys to move in the same direction, in one team, and that’s what I’ve tried to do my whole life. That’s what I’m trying to do with this team.”

Predictably, his neighbor’s words were nearly identical.

Asked about his “energy level” at a press conference a week later, a casually dressed Krzyzewski replied dryly: “Do you want me to do a cartwheel? No, I’m good. I love what I do. I still love the preparation for what I do, which is paramount if you’re going to do it at the level I want to do it, at the level we’ve done it.”

Aging and stress

The pair were equally in harmony on the latest tales of recruiting corruption, singing a happy tune and, looking on from elite perches, punctiliously denying personal knowledge of cheating. Both Hall of Famers are similarly adept at deflecting discussion of the looming possibility of retirement, a topic that inevitably sparks entertaining but meaningless guesses about a possible successor. Confounding the Knowing Class, each recently saw valued assistants take their own head coaching jobs, most notably former Blue Devil Jeff Capel, now at Pitt.

Krzyzewski and Williams don’t publicly discuss the future in terms of life choices but rather framed by their programs and this year’s teams, even as retired contemporaries travel, enjoy their grandchildren’s company, and pursue other interests. Williams does enthuse about his golf game, while Krzyzewski, hobbyless, says basketball and charity work occupy him year-round.

One-and-done players

Both men know firsthand that aging and stress have their own agendas. Krzyzewski in 1995 and 2017 was sidelined by back surgeries, the earlier case complicated by exhaustion, and has recently and unexpectedly felt too ill to coach a few road games. Williams is given to swooning when standing quickly, and had a 2012 scare occasioned by a noncancerous kidney tumor, resurrecting memories of his mother’s death on the operating table while undergoing the ever-dangerous “routine surgery.”

Despite mortality’s sobering whispers, personal approaches to success leave both coaches just as loudly demanding of players and game officials as in their younger days, if not as often. Both also have grown more flexible in their thinking.

Krzyzewski, with more wins than any coach in major-college history, no longer indulges in the bellicosity or frequent profanity that marked his earlier Duke years, low-lighted by a 1990 locker room browbeating of 10 members of the student newspaper. In recruiting one-and-done players, he harnessed his experience shaping American pros into coherent units that won Olympic gold medals.

Williams, whose teams finished first in eight of the last 14 ACC regular seasons, has escaped the pervasive sense of besiegement and questions of complicity that permeated UNC, and dogged him personally, while the NCAA, media and public questioned shadow classes benefiting Tar Heel athletes, basketball players among them.

This season there’s plenty of talent available at Chapel Hill and Durham for the masters to employ. Might as well enjoy what they do with it. Soon enough Krzyzewski and Williams will be visible mainly through names affixed to playing floors, with fans perhaps left to wonder where the glory went.

This story was originally published November 5, 2018 at 12:55 PM.