For Duke, an amazed silence after the epic collapse in Final Four

San Antonio – Inside the burning silence of the Duke’s locker room, the echo of an intermittent intermittent door. Whenever a player or a staff member leaned in the locker room of the adjacent coaches, the stroke of the door was held like a mermaid in a motionless evening.

There is nothing to prepare a team with the emotional spiral that comes with waste of a six -point lead in the last 35 seconds. After Houston scored the last nine points of the match in 33 seconds to darken Duke 70-67 Saturday evening in the Final Four, a silencer accompanied the attempts for the Blue Devils to treat it.

The players wandered quietly to grab a slice of pizza from one of the 10 stacked boxes high on a Powerade cooler. They looked at their phone to avoid visual contact with the persistent media. A walk-on has returned from the shower with tears in the eyes. Another wrote in a newspaper with a pencil.

They replayed how much a six -point lead could disappear in less than 20 seconds. But even after a wave of lower failures, missed failures and blunders, two key moments in the last 20 seconds of the Cooper Flagg’s recruit – a fault and a Miss – crowned the amazing fusion.

Flagg lacked a 12 -foot jumper, with Duke following a point, will be the room that will always live in the reruns. Duke had the chance to take control of the game and stop the hemorrhage and called a dead time with 17 seconds to play. The Blue Devils erased for Flagg, who obtained an isolation match with Houston senior in sixth year, I Wan Roberts. Flagg stopped from the inside of the track and faded with the tenses of the Roberts 6 -foot 8 inches. The shot has traveled the front edge.

“It was the coach of the play who developed,” said Flagg. “I took it in the painting. I thought I had my feet, I went up.

There was no second guessing of the room or the look. It just did not enter.

“Cooper is the best player in the country, and when you get the best player in the country where he loves, it’s really as simple as that. We had exactly what we wanted,” said Sion James de Duke. “Sometimes the shots decrease, sometimes they don’t. This is not the case.”

More difficult to explain was the flagg’s fault on Roberts when Tyrese Proctor missed the end of one and one with 20 seconds to play. Duke led 67-66 at the time, and Flagg was whistled for a fault on Roberts, who clearly went bankrupt.

The validity of the call will be debated for a long time on bar stools in the Final Four, but Flagg himself put and Duke in a vulnerable position by seeming to keep Roberts’ left arm and get whistled.

Roberts, a 63%frank launch shooting game, changed the game by making the two ends of one and one, pushing Houston to an advance of 68-67 and preparing the way for the Flagg’s final foray.

For a program that has a provocative image of grain and tenacity, it is normal that Houston’s trip to the national title game presented a box that changes the situation. Kellen Sampson, the Houston assistant, broke out one of her father’s folk-ball basketball sayings to summarize the moment.

“The discipline makes you beat more than great helps you to win,” said Kellen Sampson. “I have probably heard it a hundred million times growing up. Listen, the more disciplined you are, the more you can find yourself doing little things that will win.”

He added: “A big frank blocking was exactly what was necessary.”

Whatever the debate on the call, Flagg’s fault put Duke in a suddenly unthinkable position. They went from a six -point lead to the brand from the brand of 34 seconds to 19 seconds. The fault was the last swing, at the top of one.

The key to Houston came to leave Roberts alone on Flagg, which they did not do at the start of the game. Flagg separated them with his death, and the cougars made an adjustment to allow Roberts to manage the match by himself.

“We said here at halftime, we are going to trust Jewan,” said Kellen Sampson. “He does a hell of a tête-à-tête against Cooper. We are probably too much.”

He added: “You have defense n ° 1 in America for a reason. Trust him.”

The defense of Roberts and Houston acted from their marauds all night, with the most discordant statistics on the Duke Center, Khaman Maluach, not having managed to take a rebound in more than 21 minutes of play and at the end of the night with a more – -mine of -20.

The last salvo of Roberts obtained a difficult competition on the potential winner of Flagg.

“I thought he had done a great job to raise his hands high enough so that it was not an easy look,” said Sampson. “A few difficult shots overnight.”

Flagg finished the night with 27 points, pulling 8 for 19 on the ground. He obtained little help, because Duke had only one basket in the last 10:30 am of the match. He returned to the Duke locker room in a golf cart at 11:54 p.m., looking in space with a towel rolled around his neck.

He entered the cone of silence, suddenly facing the end of a season and probably a university career.

Three minutes later, Duke’s coach Jon Scheyer missed his wife next to him and sports director Nina King Assisi on the back. Duke has coughed the fifth biggest lead in the history of the Final Four. The loss will resonate, just like this door that slams, long in the offseason.

“I continue to come back, we have passed six with less than a minute,” said Scheyer.

He added: “We just have to finish the agreement.”