Hidden in a corner of Joe Senser's, a Minnesota sports bar, Nick Stefanow watched Duke beat Virginia Saturday on a television decidedly smaller than the 20 big-screens dotting the tavern.
Eli Nichols and Zach Maurides didn't need to rely on the good will of a bartender to watch their Blue Devils. Instead, the two former football players sat in the bleachers of Wallace Wade Stadium to witness Duke's first ACC win since 2004 with their own eyes, along with 25,525 fans more interested in Duke than wall-to-wall coverage of the Big Ten.
All three were also in Wallace Wade for the Blue Devils' last conference victory-except they were on the field, part of the action, dressed in Duke uniforms.
Now, under a new coaching staff, driven by a burgeoning confidence and surrounded by more than just empty bleachers, the Blue Devils seem primed to eradicate the losing streaks that came to define recent graduates' four- and five-year careers at Duke.
And it's people like Stefanow, Nichols and Maurides that want their former teammates to win more than anyone, even if a slight curse of bad timing does not allow them to reap the tangible benefits.
"I'm probably more excited for those guys after watching the games," said Stefanow, a tight end whose five-year career ended last fall. "It is a little bittersweet, I'm not gonna lie. It'd be great to be part of that team. I wish I had another semester, but I'm not jealous in any way."
The sentiment is echoed by Stefanow's former teammates, the players who rarely grasped the euphoria of winning. They were the butts of too many bad jokes and easy punchlines for the football punditocracy, as Duke compiled a dismal 4-42 record from 2004 to 2007.
Teams plagued by futility have trouble developing a swagger, one of the key debilitating factors for that woeful string of seasons, including a winless 0-12 mark in 2006.
"They're playing with confidence out there now. Every time we go down, I can tell they're not worried about it," Stefanow said. "Being in the locker room for five years, that wasn't... very rarely was that the case. A couple of times, me and Coach [Ted] Roof, early in his career... we knew we were going to win the game. And a lot of times when you know you're going to win, you do win the game."
David Cutcliffe, though, is not one who lacks confidence, and he injected a shot of life into an perpetually stagnant program when he was hired Dec. 15, just 21 days after the seniors' careers had ended.
For the returning players, he brought with him the gift of winning.
And it keeps on giving for the graduates, even more proud to walk around their post-college parts in Duke Football garb.
"There's definitely a bit of jealousy, but at the same time, I'm so happy with these guys," said Matt Rumsey, who traveled from Atlanta to Wallace Wade for Duke's season opener against James Madison and who will attend the Blue Devils' matchup at Georgia Tech Saturday. "All the hard work we put in, finally for them to have the opportunity to go out and make something of it, there's not really words to describe it. To have that opportunity after things were as bad as they were for as long as they were... they're gonna have a special thing."
Things are no longer as bad as they were, or bad at all, because the program has been overturned by a litany of changes-starting, of course, at the top. Cutcliffe came in and brought in an almost entirely fresh group of coaches, essentially cutting almost all ties to the previous players. The team has new uniforms, new traditions and new slogans.
If this year is, indeed, the dawn of a new day, what does that mean for the inhabitants of the extinct era?
"I'd rather the program get turned around now than never," said Eli Nichols, a 2006 captain who works as a research and development engineer in the Pratt School of Engineering. "I can't do anything about what happened in the past. It makes me feel good that the same guys I played with are winning games now. We're on par in terms of the type of players the old coaches were getting, which are quality players. It's just nice to see that we are capable of winning."
The impact of a winning streak has been felt beyond campus borders, too. Maurides, a 2008 graduate working for SciQuest in Cary, walked around his office and told N.C. State and North Carolina graduates that Duke was ready to turn the corner under Cutcliffe. Maurides had sensed it in his conversations with current players.
Then again, when he was playing, the Blue Devils always thought they were ready to turn the corner. This time just felt different, Maurides said.
"That was just my secondary confidence coming from the guys on the team," he said. "I felt really confident in those statements. It wasn't just me hyping up my team."
And with one minor tick of language-"my team"-Maurides' loyalty is spoken for.
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