The basketball


world looked on at her looking on. And, as the shot left Gordon Hayward’s hands, Mickie Krzyzewski thought, “It’s on line. But it’s not going in.”


It was the shot that was almost the


shot. The shot that could have made the Butler Bulldogs’ Hoosiers-like run to the national championship a fairy tale come true. The shot that could have sadly ended our team’s own fairy tale, could have brought to an abrupt, heart- breaking conclusion a season of cham- pionships for a group of deserving Duke players who had given all of themselves to come together and become worthy of championships.


Standing at her seat, her view unob- structed, she saw Kyle Singler knocked to the floor, she saw the ball leave Hayward’s hands, but in that moment and on that day, she was not nervous. Her husband’s team had already made it to basketball’s Promised Land. She had been married to her husband


173 WORTHY CHAMPS


for more than 40 years and, for 35 of those years, he had been a head bas- ketball coach. As she had learned over those many years, as they had learned together, in the life of a college basket- ball coach and in the lifetimes of each of that coach’s individual teams, the Final Four is the Promised Land. To get there is bliss. To get close and narrowly miss, devastating. If you ask the coach’s wife if she is superstitious, she will tell you that she is not. She is too rational to believe that something she wears, something she holds, some particular thing she does will affect the outcome of a game. She will tell you that she is not supersti- tious, but that she and her husband do have a game-day routine, a routine that formed over their early years as coach


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