Pain Is A Privilege – Yahoo Sports

Duke fans are in pain.

To be upset in the NCAA Tournament is always agonizing. An upset loss with the game seemingly in hand hurts all the more. But to be upset in a game that was in your control on a miraculous buzzer beater that required so many things to go wrong in succession—both out of Duke’s control (a freshman making a nearly half-court 3 after an ice-cold shooting night) and in its control (Cayden Boozer’s panicked pass)—is arguably the most painful loss that Blue Devil fans have ever experienced.

Advertisement

The context for Duke fans exacerbates the pain. Since the Blue Devils’ fifth national championship in 2015, Duke has been excruciatingly close to returning to that mountaintop over and over. The 2019 Blue Devils had arguably the best cohort of freshman talent in college basketball history, but injuries led to a disjointed year that was cut short in the Elite 8 by a late (but not quite buzzer-beating) shot. The 2020 team was rounding into form, and had a potentially all-time great story developing in the emergence of Justin Robinson, before the NCAA Tournament was cancelled. Mike Krzyzewski final team—well, we don’t need to rehash what happened in the 2022 Final Four. And now, in back-to-back years, Jon Scheyer’s Blue Devils have seen victory slip through their fingers late in March Madness.

Any one of those blows would be a generational heartbreak for most programs. Duke fans bear the burden of all of them over the last decade. Each one compounds the pain of its successors. Over the past decade, almost every season Duke enters March with legitimate National Championship aspirations. The Blue Devils scale the mountain before faltering at the peak, making each fall feel farther and farther.

But would Duke fans truly trade in that pain? Would the loud minority of Blue Devil “fans” (with those quotation marks doing heavy lifting) bashing Jon Scheyer and Cayden Boozer on social media be OK with multiple years between ACC titles? Or a half-decade…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/pain-privilege-190050685.html

Author :

Publish date : 2026-03-30 19:00:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.