A long day at work: After 42 years, Coach K’s last home game brings tears, unexpected loss
By 8:20 Saturday morning there was already a long line of people, most dressed in royal blue, most carrying love notes written in marker on poster board, stretching from the entrances on either end of Cameron Indoor Stadium. They’d come from all over to be a part of Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game at Duke, and even a pregame show that began nine hours before the main event felt like an event, nonetheless — something to witness.
It was early then, the sun still climbing over the pines that line Duke’s campus, and Krzyzewski had already arrived for work. He’d parked his black Cadillac Escalade in his usual spot, steps away from the tower where his office resides up on the sixth floor, with an endless view of campus and beyond. He walked into the building alone, a good 45 minutes before any other member of his staff arrived.
The parking lot didn’t exist when Krzyzewski became the Blue Devils’ head coach in 1980. Neither did the office tower. It came much later, years after he led Duke to the first of its five national championships. Nonetheless, his routine was familiar as ever. He’d begun most mornings for the past 42 years the way he began Saturday, arriving at Duke and walking into work.
And now it was happening for the final time on a game day at Cameron Indoor Stadium. At one point on Saturday, hours before tip-off against North Carolina, Krzyzewski took a moment in his office to look out into the distance, across the rectangular lawn that over the years came to be known as Krzyzewskiville. What he saw stayed with him, even after a 94-81 defeat that will, without question, be remembered among the most stunning and disappointing of his career.
“I was amazed at the number of people in Krzyzewskiville,” he said later, after a postgame celebration in his honor that at times looked tortuous for him, given the circumstances. “The atmosphere for the whole day was incredible. Just incredible. And I was hoping, because our guys walked through there and all that, that (it) would help us.”
This was not the ending anyone foresaw, or the one that seemed preordained. Krzyzewski often references the Basketball Gods – those invisible forces that might make a team go hot, or cold – and those Gods proved cruel to Duke on Saturday. The Blue Devils held a 7-point lead with a little less than 13 minutes remaining and then appeared to hit a Carolina blue wall.
Duke’s lead gradually shrunk and then disappeared all together. In the final moments, the inevitability set in. A hush fell over the crowd. Krzyzewski, especially conversational with officials during the first half, and at times as animated as ever, stood still throughout most of the final minutes. The defeat assured, he placed his hands on his hips. He crossed his arms.
He finally took a seat. He didn’t stand again, until it ended.
“He was disappointed in how we played, how we finished” said Paolo Banchero, Duke’s standout freshman who, along with his teammates, was helpless to slow the Tar Heels’ onslaught during the final 10 minutes or so. Banchero spoke quietly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what could be said. Wendell Moore, the Duke junior, wasn’t any more illuminating a few feet away.
“We just couldn’t get a stop,” he said.
In the second half, UNC, at times, made it look easy. Krzyzewski and his coaching staff, meanwhile, felt helpless to offer anything from their vantage point on the far end of the court, opposite the one where the Blue Devils stumbled again and again defensively. Krzyzewski built his program in the 1980s and ’90s on tough, menacing defense, but Duke’s defense was “just horrible,” he said, in the second half.
That was, perhaps, one surprise. Another: Krzyzewski, known for his hard outer shell, allowed the emotion of the day to overcome him a time or two. He said he hadn’t expected to cry. It surprised him when he did in the moments before tip-off.
That was the power of it all. The realization that this was it, in this building. The return of so many former players. The understanding that there’d never be another work day like this one, a morning drive to the office, followed by a shootaround, followed by a game in a building where he’d won 572 times. And so the tears came, more than once early on.
“Then the game started,” Krzyzewski said, “and I was crying more about how we were playing.”
More games to play
For 42 years, he has had the same job. Day after day. Week after week. Months turning into years, into decades, until it reached an end, of sorts, Saturday.
There will be more games to play. Krzyzewski made sure to offer a reminder of that – first telling the crowd in the moments after the defeat, at the start of a celebration in his honor, that the season was not yet over.
“It’s time to move on now,” he said about 30 minutes later, in front of a roomful of reporters.
Throughout his final season, Krzyzewski has been adamant about staying in the moment, resisting overtures to go too far back into the past. He resisted the talk of the last of this, or that, but there was no escaping such reflection because it was here: his last home game. The final time he’d make the walk from the Duke locker room and across the court to the home bench, and the final time he’d walk off that court, win or lose.
The atmosphere inside the building, at least for the first 37 or 38 minutes of game time, until the reality set in late, matched that on the outside. For hours, people came to walk around and soak it in. It felt equal parts like an outdoor music festival and an SEC football tailgate, like a celebration and also a little like a somber farewell. Nobody wanted to say goodbye, and then the moment came when Krzyzewski appeared on the court for the first time.
The roar was deafening. Duke recovered from a sloppy start, took a slim lead into halftime and seemed on the verge of pulling away. And then, in a sweltering old gym and amid the most pressure any Blue Devils team had faced in a long time — the burden of winning this particular game, in this particular moment — Duke succumbed.
It wasn’t the magnitude of the moment, Banchero and Moore said afterward.
It was more that on this particular night, the Tar Heels were better.
Krzyzewski wondered about the psychology of it all. In a way he and his players had spent much of the past week basking in some kind of anticipated coronation, like a eulogy for the living.
“Basically we’re living in a penthouse these last few days,” Krzyzewski said, “with room service and everyone saying nice things. And we didn’t play hungry today.”
A lingering defeat
Before Saturday, he’d endured 75 defeats in this building. The 76th will linger.
It came on his 15,327th day on the job at Duke, one that began like thousands of those other days and ended with Krzyzewski hugging his wife, Mickie, and embracing his 10 grandchildren during a postgame ceremony in his honor.
For most of it — the parts where a video played overhead, or while people spoke — Krzyzewski sat in a chair and looked for all the world like a man who’d have rather been anywhere else but there, listening to people say nice things about him after a defeat against a bitter rival.
“We didn’t play well,” he told the crowd in an unscripted moment, before turning to the dozens of former players, all dressed in the same white pullovers, who were still standing behind the Duke bench. “And there were times when you didn’t, either.”
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There was a small laugh, a brief moment of levity. Soon, Krzyzewski embraced his family, told his wife and daughters and grandkids that he loved them, even more than basketball, and walked off the court for the final time. So many things had changed around him over 42 years, in the sport where he’d made his name and outside of it, but Cameron Indoor Stadium looked largely like it did from the day he walked in. Some things would endure.
“I’m glad this is over,” he told reporters moments later, though it wasn’t as though he hadn’t appreciated the celebration of his career and his program. It was, instead, that he desired to get back to it. He’d coached his final home game, yes, but he wasn’t done. It was the losses, he said, that offer the greatest lessons.
The tears were gone now. The reality had set in. He’d lost for the final time in the building where he’d won hundreds of times; where he’d built one of the most successful college athletics programs in American sports history. There’d be no opportunity to leave with a better taste, no chance to walk off this court a winner one last time. That opportunity was gone, replaced by the one ahead.
“Let’s just coach and see what the hell happens in the tournaments,” he said, and not long after that he’d answered his final question and disappeared, back toward his office.
At around 11 p.m., Krzyzewski’s Escalade was still in its parking lot. It’d been there for 15 hours by then. The lights were on upstairs in the upper floors of the tower next to Cameron, where workers were cleaning up. The next time Duke played here, it would no longer be Krzyzewski’s team — though for now it still was, however long the season might last. A practicing Catholic, Krzyzewski had to be at Mass in about eight hours.
After a defeat that will undoubtedly stay with him, he hadn’t yet left work.
This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 12:41 AM.
