Those Aren’t Tears of a Crown for Blue Devils

SAN ANTONIO — Tears flowed inside the Duke locker room like the misty waters that swirl in the nearby Riverwalk, stunned players slumped at their lockers while staring into the distance and wondering aloud how it got away from them.

“Unexplainable,” said Sean Dockery before he buried his face in a towel and walked to a back room.

“Painful,” said Shelden Williams, who could not look at reporters as he tried to answer questions.

“Shock and disappointment,” said a red-eyed J.J. Redick.

Luol Deng doled out hugs to teary-eyed team managers.

Who could blame them?

Duke had an eight-point lead with less than three minutes remaining Saturday night and was envisioning an all-Atlantic Coast Conference national championship game in 48 hours against rival Georgia Tech.

Connecticut, though, would bring the Blue Devils back to reality with its stunning 79-78 victory at the Alamodome.

“I’m shocked that we couldn’t pull it out,” Redick said. “And I’m disappointed that this is the last time I’m going to play with this group.”

Perhaps not as disappointed as senior point guard Chris Duhon, who was crying at the podium in a postgame news conference.

It was especially difficult for a player who thought he was going to bookend his college career with national championships (he was a role player as a freshman on Duke’s 2001 national title team).

“We had momentum but we just couldn’t get the ball in the hole,” said Duhon, whose three-point bank shot from 35 feet at the buzzer closed Duke’s final gap to a point. “In those situations, our defense wasn’t that great for us. We gave up.

“I mean, I think we just settled late in the game. You know, we just settled for jump shots instead of realizing that we were in the double bonus and that ... we needed to penetrate, hopefully get fouled, knock down big free throws.”

With less than 15 seconds remaining and Connecticut clinging to a 76-75 lead, Duke thought it had a winning play with Redick, normally a sharpshooter who loves to shoot from beyond the three-point arc, driving the lane.

The Duke players, it turns out, were not the only ones crying.

Enter Blue Devil Coach Mike Krzyzewski.

“You’re either trying to score or you’re trying to get fouled or both,” said Krzyzewski, who earlier snapped at a reporter for daring to suggest that Duke had collapsed (“Obviously, you didn’t see the game tonight,” he said.)

“We didn’t get any. You know, to me that was the game right there.”

Or was it Duke’s three centers -- Williams, Shavlik Randolph and Nick Horvath -- all fouling out?

“The foul trouble we had in the second half,” Krzyzewski said, “was difficult because our centers played 40 minutes and had 15 fouls.”

Imagine that, Duke not getting the calls.

Especially not two days after the NCAA gave the Blue Devils a free pass in announcing it would not strip Duke of its 1999 national runner-up status despite the sports’ governing body acknowledging that then-freshman Corey Maggette should have been ineligible for accepting money from his Amateur Athletic Union coach before playing at Duke.

To his credit, Redick would not finger the officials.

“The refs call the game a certain way,” he said. “I’m not going to make any excuses.”

Still, that did not stop members of the Blue Devil staff and Duke radio broadcasting team in the locker room to decry the lack of a call and demonstrate how their guy was hacked when Redick attacked the basket and was stripped of the ball on his way up.

The day before the game, Krzyzewski lamented that the story was always bigger when Duke lost.

His players must have gotten that message.

“We lost today,” Williams said. “They scored more points than us. They played well.”

Said Randolph: “Any time you end the season, it’s definitely an emotional time.”