That was loud.
Plenty of voices were lost after the frantic basketball bonanza that was Friday’s Countdown to Craziness, from more than three hours of nonstop cheering, yelling and singing, but that didn’t stop the sleep-deprived Cameron Crazies from nearly shattering the eardrums of all in attendance. It certainly didn’t stop the event from living up to its name.
This was Countdown, and Duke was as lovably crazy as ever.
Our Sasha Richie put it eloquently in her recap of the event: Countdown is a love letter to Duke men’s basketball. The scrimmage, by design, doesn’t matter, and any victories taken from it are purely moral, not literal. The inherent purpose is entirely to be a spectacle—to tug on some heartstrings, to use inspiring words like “fight” and “urgency” to stoke the flames of fandom and to pump the student body up for another year of basketball.
Friday, it did its job masterfully.
"Just seeing the atmosphere, I don't think any other school in the country, I mean besides maybe one more school I can think of, has an atmosphere that's even remotely close to this," freshman forward Mark Mitchell said after the game.
To be fair, this perhaps isn’t surprising—the Blue Devils are known for their rabid fandom, after all—but in the first year without their talismanic head coach on the sidelines and local rival North Carolina’s preeminence in preseason polling, it seemed natural that something would feel different, if for no other reason than the immense change Duke has seen in the six-plus months since its heartbreaking Final Four loss to the Tar Heels in New Orleans.
In a way, that assumption was correct. In another, it could not be further from the truth.
Countdown in 2021 largely had one central theme: former head coach Mike Krzyzewski’s impending and permanent farewell from his post of 42 years. It was a celebration of lasts—his last team, his last games marshaling the Blue Devils on his namesake court, his final Countdown, his last chance to win a sixth national championship trophy.
When the curtains fell over center court last year, a headshot of Krzyzewski was projected on each side. As the drapes fell, there he was, seated pensively and stoically, in perfect contrast to the fiesta of a student section bowing to him, shouting at him and cheering his name. It was a last hurrah for the game’s greatest in front of the game’s greatest fans.
The energy last year was overwhelmingly positive, naturally, but there was a different scent in the air Friday night. This was not a celebration of lasts but a commemoration of firsts, and yet, through it all, the applause was just as loud, section 17 just as packed and the students just as, if not more, excited to usher in the next era of Blue Devil basketball.
"It was just incredible," freshman center Kyle Filipowski said. "I mean, just seeing all those people there rooting for us, it's a big motivator. That's a lot of love. We're gonna show the love back."
We don’t know how good of a head coach Jon Scheyer may be, just as we don’t know if Jeremy Roach can replicate his March Madness form to command Duke’s offense, if Dereck Lively II and Filipowski can play together at center or if Christian Reeves will redshirt.
That’s the beauty and danger with firsts: they are unknown. But that same uncertainty is exactly what makes a journey worth taking.
Much as finality was a theme in 2021-22, newness is a theme in 2022-23. There are 11 players on this roster who had never stepped on Cameron Indoor Stadium’s famed floor prior to Countdown, accompanied by the passionate and cacophonous choir of Duke’s striped-shirt-wearing band and frenzied student section. That is not even mentioning coaching additions Jai Lucas and Mike Schrage or the 6-foot-5 Scheyer.
Whether it be the stadium-wide laughter at Reeves’ “Mask off” introduction, Jaden Schutt’s dance to LMFAO’s “Shots” or the unanimous eruption at the mere mentions of Dariq Whitehead, Lively, Roach and Scheyer, there was not a soul inside wholly, or even partially, disinvested from the proceedings.
It was passionate and loud as ever, even if so many of the things and people that have made Countdown special in the past have departed for the NBA or a backyard garden and the tall task of raising a puppy. Hundreds of students still stayed overnight for tickets, hundreds more beat the crack of dawn. Freshmen still showed up in droves to get their first set of light-up devil horns, and gallons of blue paint were still slathered on faces.
"It started last night for me when I was driving home and I got a call from Debbie (Savarino)," Scheyer said. "She told me 'you need to get over here: There's about 500 kids here,' and I spent some time with them. Just to see Cameron—we haven't been here for a while, and to see Cameron the way that it was, our students were incredible. They were in there for a few hours but they packed it."
It sounds cheesy, but there is truth in the statement that “with every ending is a new beginning,” especially in this context. Last year was the ending, Friday was the beginning. Yet, it still possessed all the things that made that ending and the preceding story so undeniably special.
So, while there is still reminiscing to be done and fond memories to look back upon, this program and its fanbase are not focused on the chapters behind them, but on those waiting to be written, rewritten and rewritten once more.
And that is something worth getting excited about.
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Andrew Long is a Trinity junior and sports editor of The Chronicle's 119th volume.