'3 points to win the game'

Just about a week ago, I was standing on the field behind Wade Stadium as the football team wrapped up practice.

As practice was ending, Ted Roof started hollering, "Three points to win the game, three points to win the game!"

At the time, I thought he was nuts. Three points to win the game? This is just practice. Not a game, practice. Plus, this is Duke Football: "Win the game?" Yeah, right.

The field goal unit lined up, probably from about 40 yards away. The defense lined up across from them. Joe Surgan stepped up, Casey Hales snapped the ball, and Surgan boomed it through the uprights. From the sidelines, the whole team swarmed onto the field and mobbed the kicker like they actually won the game.

Fast forward 100 hours or so.

Joe Surgan's lining up again, this time from only 28 yards. There are six seconds on the clock, and Duke's losing by just a point. I'll bet that Roof was even yelling "Three points to win the game!" somewhere on the sidelines.

Snap. Thwap. Thud.

Oy.

• The Duke Football Anti-Train

(These wings are spicy enough that I looked at the sauce and decided I couldn't handle it. I licked some of the sauce off one of my fingers, and my face went numb. For three full minutes. Before he could start, my friend had to sign a waiver saying Chai's would not be responsible if the wings killed him. No joke.)

Anyway, my friend took one bite, and he started sweating. Four wings in, his nose started bleeding. After six wings, he looked like he'd just finished a marathon while battling a giant squid at the same time. By the time just two wings remained on the plate, he couldn't even speak anymore, and he responded to our questions with grunts.

He was shaking like Daryl Strawberry after 10 cups of coffee.

But he finished. Man, oh man, did he finish.

So after the ball got blocked against Wake Forest, my first thought wasn't, 'Boy this team keeps finding new ways to lose.' Instead, I thought, 'Hmmm, I wonder if each member of the field goal team could polish off the Chai's Challenge.'

You can draw your own conclusions--I'm not going to moralize like I'm on Around the Horn.

Anyway, The Anti-Train's not about that. The beautiful part of expecting to not-win every game is that you can never be disappointed. You're basically guaranteed to be pleasantly surprised.

So while the prevailing attitude after Saturday's game was disappointment--from Surgan, from Roof, from wideout Jomar Wright--The Anti-Train prefers to focus on the positive.

So what if Duke fumbled twice inside the 20-yard line and missed two field goals of less than 30 yards? Against Richmond, the Blue Devils couldn't even move the ball. So what if the game-winning field goal attempt was blocked? Duke drove 61 yards in less than 90 seconds just to get into that situation.

The Blue Devils looked like an actual football team on Saturday, which is a start. They're a lock to move out of the No. 1 spot in espn.com's "Bottom 10," which is damaging to The Anti-Train but probably for the best.

Because here on The Anti-Train, we'd like Duke Football to win--really, we would--we're just okay with the team not-winning. In fact, we expect it.

But until the Blue Devils don't not-win, the beat goes on.

Choo, choo.