The men's basketball team had no reason to expect the version of the N.C. State team which came calling Sunday afternoon.
"We didn't meet the challenge, and it's the first time we haven't in a while," Wolfpack head coach Les Robinson said.
Coming into Cameron Indoor Stadium, State had won three games in a row for the first time since the 1991-92 season. The pack hadn't suffered a 20-point loss since a Jan. 29 95-73 setback at Clemson. It had been, in so many ways, a program still struggling wit the lingering effects of former head coach Jim Valvano's departure five years ago. And for the last month, it finally looked like N.C. State had the thing turned around.
But the Pack made the mistake of taking the bus ride to Durham.
"Duke really just destroyed us in the first seven or eight minutes of the basketball game," Robinson said. "If you equate it to a fight, we got knocked down really quickly. We stumbled back up, but we really didn't recover. I mean, they just went ahead and punched us out and we were staggering out there."
The 85-58 loss brought back horrible ghosts from the past. Academic probations, low graduation rates and NCAA violations still loom large, casting a menacing shadow over a program desperately seeking the sun.
"With our team, it's looked upon a little differently--we're not out of the woods yet," Robinson said. "Other teams have games like that this time of the year, and it's sometimes, 'They had a bad night.'
"Wit us, it's 'Maybe they're slipping, slipping back again.'"
Robinson admitted that the Duke defense had something to do wit his team's 4-for-30 first half shooting performance.
"You minimize your losses, losses being 26 missed shots," Robinson said. "You minimize them by not playing as fast. Duke made us play faster and made us think that we could get it back quickly. We had guys shooting shots they hadn't shot all year. I saw 'em doing things I hadn't seen in a long time."
It had been almost a month since the Wolfpack habitually made passes into the teeth of the defense, threw balls carelessly out of bounds and played to the strengths of its opponent.
"The tougher they got defensively, the more we softened up offensively," Robinson said. "We tried to do things we will hopefully not do any more this season.
I'm sure that both Duke and this arena had a lot to do with it. Call a spade a spade."
It was a spade.
But Robinson was quite confident that his Pack will bounce back.
"We lost today, and we got humiliated, really, but we will come back this year and we will win more games this year," Robinson said. "This was just a very bad day, and we'll overcome it."
"We may have thought we were ready today but, obviously, we were not. We will be ready the rest of the year."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.