Sunday's win could change Duke's season

The following is a 100 percent true story (if shortened for brevity's sake):

Saturday afternoon, during the final exciting moments of North Carolina's overtime loss to Maryland.

FRIEND: I feel bad saying this, but I really do like Roy Williams. He seems like a nice guy.

ME: Yea, but, you have to admit, he doesn't have the best fashion sense.

FRIEND: He has the blue blazer!

ME: Outside of the blue blazer.

FRIEND: I suppose so. I didn't like what he wore against us. He's no Coach K.

ME: I like Coach K, but I don't like how he never takes the jacket off. I wish, just once, he'd throw that thing to the floor, like Leonard Hamilton-style. That'd be cool.

Yes, as we Catholics can tell you, prophecies come true on Sundays-if generally a bit earlier in the day. And so Sunday night, during the creamy middle of a delicious dessert of a game, in an arena that was warm but a far cry from the swelter it was a week and a half earlier, Mike Krzyzewski ripped off his jacket.

I don't claim to know the last time Krzyzewski made a show of taking his jacket off during the game. That's what research is for, and here's a journalism tip for you youngsters: You become a columnist precisely so you don't have to do research (right, Mitch Albom?). All I know is it's the first time it's happened since I've been at Duke, which means it's the first time in a long time.

It was also the first time in a long time the Blue Devils had this kind of statement win so late in the season. The biggest wins during this Final Four drought-four tortuous years and counting-have primarily been notched in the season's first three months: early-season tournament titles at the Garden or Maui, dissections of top-10 teams in December games in the New York area and victories over ACC contenders the first time around.

But Sunday was, in Krzyzewski's words, the biggest Duke game of the last three years-a declaration that perhaps shows just how seriously the coach was taking talk of his program's demise.

In his mind, Sunday may not have just redefined the season.

It may have redefined the program.

Maybe that explains Krzyzewski's equally out-of-the-blue charge through the Blue Devils' huddle to incite the crowd during the starting lineups. The coach's sideline behavior, usually more conversational than theatrical, was a statement directed not just to the refs who seemed to get every call wrong on both sides of the floor or his team that had let a 22-point lead vanish even quicker than it was established. It was a message sent also to the public pessimists proclaiming the all-too-accurate accounts of what looked like another late-winter into early-spring swoon for a once-promising Blue Devil team-one that shouted loudly and clearly that Duke is still Duke.

It was as if Mike Krzyzewski had just been called out by Jacobim Mugatu for having one look. And then he turned left.

Moreover, it came on the heels of a lineup change that dealt with the struggles of point guards Nolan Smith and Greg Paulus by downgrading the significance of the position, even as it's in the midst of a renaissance at the college and professional level.

It's hard to get less traditional than deciding that point guards and centers need not apply for success in March. But the last two seasons have showcased a Krzyzewski willing to adapt on the run and utilize less traditional strategies, from shifting to a more open, four-out, one-in offense and using zone defenses to honoring the school's basketball tradition by embedding a weird watermark of the chapel and the Duke logo on the back of the jerseys. (The night's biggest unanswered question, of course: Just when will they be available at the Duke store?).

That adaptability was never more on display than on Sunday night, when Krzyzewski, long the deist watchmaker of Cameron Indoor Stadium's pectacle, took center stage along with the virtuoso performances of Gerald Henderson and Jon Scheyer.

In the final 30 seconds, with the game at last in hand, the coach embraced the night's other two stars. We've seen Krzyzewski hug his players at the end of hard-fought battles before, but too often the tenor of those embraces was one of disconsolation, when seniors such as Chris Carrawell, Jason Williams and J.J. Redick were just rudely and prematurely dismissed from their NCAA careers in the Sweet Sixteen.

Sunday night was nothing short of a victory hug, the kind on the highlight reel that runs before games at Cameron, the kind saved for Final Fours and national championships.

Is it foreshadowing or just another temporary reprieve? That's one for the real prophets.