In a game that inspired talk of stadium deities influencing the final score, Nate James wasn't going to deny that Duke got some lucky bounces in Saturday's 84-83 win over No. 22 DePaul.
But James also wouldn't let the Blue Devils' good fortune take away from their effort in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
"The team played so hard together, something had to go in," he said. "The fans were great; we didn't want to disappoint them. You play hard-you should get some luck."
Saturday's contest won't win any basketball game beauty pageants, but that's appropriate for a showdown clinched by a banked three-pointer from a 6-foot-10 freshman who played all of four minutes.
The 17th-ranked Blue Devils turned the ball over 23 times, shot 41 percent from the floor and made several critical errors late in the second half. Duke also struggled to keep the Blue Demons off the offensive boards and saw senior Chris Carrawell miss 11 of his 14 shots.
But when the final buzzer sounded, the young Blue Devils had evened their record in close games against ranked teams at 2-2. They had been offered several chances to let the contest slip away and said "No thank you" each time.
"Not all games are going to be pretty," Shane Battier said. "Some games you have to muck it out. Once [the freshmen] learn that, it helps us out down the stretch."
And muck it out they did. The Devils erased an 11-point lead in the first half and a 12-point deficit in the second. DePaul looked to be pulling away when it went up 50-38 with 16:23 to go in the
DePaul capped its 12-2 run with a Rashon Burno layup after center Steven Hunter collided with Jason Williams under the basket while dishing the ball. The whistle didn't blow, Mike Krzyzewski was screaming at the officials and the Blue Devils were staring at their first double-digit deficit in Cameron since Feb. 1998.
"I thought my guys got off the floor several times," Krzyzewski said. "We almost got knocked out early in the first half and early in the second half. We were ready to play, but we didn't play intelligently."
Shane Battier responded with a three-pointer to start an 18-6 spurt that tied the game at 56 with 9:48 remaining. Williams evened things up with the fourth trey of the run-and only his second in eight attempts to that point.
Less than five minutes later, the freshman hit another long-range bomb, this one bouncing high off the rim before rattling around the cylinder and deciding to fall. On a night when they struggled from the floor, Duke got its first lucky bounce of the game and its biggest lead, 66-60.
But then came their next golden opportunity to go home losers. After DePaul star Quentin Richardson couldn't handle a pass inside, James-who scored a career-high 22 points and almost single-handedly kept Duke in the game in the first half-made one of his few mistakes of the night.
He committed a charge on a baseline drive to foul out with less than five minutes to play.
Duke seemed to handle his departure well at first, leading by four when Williams stole a pass two possessions later. He drove coast-to-coast and went up for a one-handed dunk that would have set new decibel records in Cameron and put the Blue Devils up six. Instead, the ball careened off the rim, and on DePaul's possession, the referees called a foul on Carlos Boozer's block of Hunter.
After the center sank both free throws for a four-point turnaround, Duke called a timeout.
"The first thing I told [my teammates] was to go out there and play," James said. "Things happen in basketball, and if you spend the next minute and a half thinking about it, it'll snowball.
"They did a great job recovering. They made so many great plays at the end."
When that end came, both teams, who relied heavily on their starters, were fighting fatigue as well as each other. It showed when Williams couldn't get enough air on his dunk, but it also showed when he beat a tired Burno off the dribble for a layup on the previous possession. Mental toughness replaced physical stamina as the key to the game, and the Blue Devils had just enough of it to win.
They also had the good fortune of some friendly bounces from the Cameron rims-and the good fortune of having the stadium's fans behind them.
"The last couple of years, when we kept beating everyone by 30, it kind of got the Cameron Crazies bored," Carrawell said. "But tonight they were in full effect. They showed why this is the best crowd in the country. We're going to have a lot of games like that; everyone's going to be a dogfight."
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