When Nicole Erickson banked the ball gently off the glass and watched it drop cleanly through the net, giving Duke an 11-point advantage with 2:19 to play, the mix between a scowl and an outright high-beam smile said what everybody on the floor and in the record-breaking crowd knew.
The game belonged to Duke. The day belonged to the seniors.
They were playing for history, and they were playing for pride. And in the game that was slowly winding down, a game that Duke coach Gail Goestenkors later called a "40-minute battle," there proved to be plenty of both.
For every run there was a counter-run, for every big basket a defensive stop. There was rivalry; there was animosity. There was Nicole Erickson's 1000th career point and Goestenkors' first career sweep of the Tar Heels.
And there was a fitting ending for six careers.
Just maybe for a group of seniors who started with a middle-of-the-pack ACC school and led the Blue Devils in rewriting the pages of Duke history again and again, it was the only way to go out-Duke versus North Carolina, home floor, Senior Day.
For co-captain Hilary Howard it couldn't have been more perfect. Huddled around in the locker room before the game, she swapped smiles and anxious glances with her teammates. Not much was said. Everybody just knew.
"It didn't even have to be said," Howard said. "It wasn't something that we had to mention. We were so excited to go out on top against Carolina."
All six of Duke's seniors played; all six scored. For Goestenkors it was the perfect way to say goodbye.
"I'm just so proud of these seniors," she said. "They're the reason we've come as far as we have as a program.... They put Duke on the map."
And they were almost all that kept the Blue Devils' last dance in Cameron from ending early.
Duke's three starting seniors-Erickson, Howard and Michele VanGorp-who average just under 36 points a game as a trio, netted 60 in their final home game. But what made their performance all the more remarkable was the timing.
While the Blue Devils were struggling in the first half, Howard stepped up big, picking up a pair of steals and scoring nine of her team's 20 points in the first 10 minutes. And almost like Goestenkors herself had scripted it, when the Tar Heels focused on Howard to begin the second half, VanGorp and Erickson took over.
The tandem of Purdue transfers, whom North Carolina coach Sylvia Hatchell credited with putting the Duke program on an "entirely new plane," scored 35 of its 44 points in the second half.
"[Howard] really got us going in the first half, attacking, shooting, just getting to the basket," Goestenkors said. "And when we needed it in the second half, [VanGorp] and Erickson were there. We have great balance on this team."
After the game, though, Hatchell had a somewhat different interpretation of VanGorp's success.
"I wish she would teach Drama 101 at Carolina," the Tar Heel coach said after watching most of her regulars get in second-half foul trouble.
But the only role VanGorp played in the second half was the one she has played all season-team MVP.
The script has become overused this season, and there's little doubt opposing coaches are tired of seeing it. After a slow first half, Duke, like in the first meeting between these two teams, went directly to its star post player to start the second half. And the Macomb, Mich., senior delivered.
Despite explicitly coaching her team to limit VanGorp's opportunities the whole game, a lesson learned from a 28-point performance in Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels were again unable to stop her in the second half. All Chanel Wright could do when asked about VanGorp's success late in the game was to turn to her coach and ask, "Can you answer that?"
But it happened just the way Goestenkors planned.
"We talked about it at halftime," she said. "We weren't taking advantage of our size. And then in the second half we went inside more, which opened things up.
"We've got the best player on the best team in the ACC."
But for Howard, Erickson, VanGorp, Naz Medhanie, Payton Black and Takisha Jones, the game was best summed up not in the statistics, but in Howard's post-game address to the crowd.
"This has been the best four years of my life," she said, standing at halfcourt, "but we've still got a lot of basketball left to be played."
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