why I'm not bitter about the loss:

(something I sent to a friend that was asking me how I was taking it today)

when your program has won 4 national championships in 20 years you realize that you can't get too greedy. even the best team each year only has about an 18% chance of winning it all. So to win 20% of the championships in a given 20 year period is pretty absurd. Even if we had the best team every year we wouldn't expect more than that, and clearly we haven't had the best team every year. And we were a couple bounces away from winning another 2-3, so being bitter and bitching would just be silly as a fan. There are lots of Duke fans that have mini-meltdowns after games like that and start ripping on K's recruiting, gameplan, or some of our guys that consistently make mistakes. And I think that is just silly. Being a Duke basketball fan is awesome, year in and year out. If our fans don't think we're lucky to have this team and this school to root for right now then they've just gotten spoiled. We always have good guys that play for our team, most of our players stick around and graduate, and we've never committed any major NCAA violations. We may be the mosted hated team in college sports, but that is because success breeds contempt. And I'm positive that given the opportunity to achieve what Duke basketball has in the last 20 years all of the haters would gladly trade programs.

I know that down the line Coach K is going to retire, and when he does we're likely to go through a dry spell much like UCLA did post-Wooden. I'll save my meltdowns for those years of potential futility. Or maybe we'll hire Brad Stevens from Butler and he'll keep us going (I love that guy and would love to see him coach my program).

I'm proud of our players and team. The had a great season and just picked a bad night to play Arizona. If Arizona plays like that the rest of the way noone is going to stop them, but I highly doubt they will. My only disappointment for the game is that our seniors didn't get to go out in more heroic fashion. After the great careers they had I'd have liked to see them lose in a way that was worthy of a memory.

back to the grind.