With first place in the ACC at stake, UNC-Duke rivalry revitalized in Heels’ fiery win
You could say that everything is always on the line when Duke and North Carolina play, especially at the end of the season. You could say that there’s no way to ratchet up the temperature any higher.
You could say that.
Then put a title on the line for the first time in more than a decade and see what happens.
You end up with Cormac Ryan shushing the crowd after one of his many, many 3-pointers. You end up with angry Duke students throwing water and ice and gumballs —”Who has a gumball?” Harrison Ingram asked, afterward — at the North Carolina players as they celebrated in front of them, and you end up with Jon Scheyer apologizing to those same students.
You end up with a Grayson Allen-style tripping controversy and a Marcus Paige-esque double-clutch buzzer-beater and a North Carolina player doing things that hadn’t been done since Antawn Jamison or Hubert Davis.
What you end up with is a rivalry revitalized, if not reborn: Reforged in a crucible of rekindled emotion, the chummy collegiality — these schools are often peers as much as they are enemies — dismissed when there’s once again a championship at stake.
Players yelling at fans? Fans yelling at players? All of the feelings, good and bad and hurt and aggrieved, ran deep. Ran deeper.
“It was lit,” Ingram said. “We were talking crazy. It was fun.”
“I love it, man,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said, with a tongue-in-cheek apology of his own for Duke’s fans: “Sorry.”
The ACC regular-season title is North Carolina’s, and North Carolina’s alone, after Saturday’s 84-79 win at Cameron, the second straight time Mike Krzyzewski, seated on the baseline adjacent to his former bench, watched North Carolina ruin Duke’s final home game. Two years ago, he called the loss in his Cameron farewell “unacceptable.” Saturday, his successor apologized again, with Scheyer telling students afterward, “We’re going to get this right.”
“I told the team afterwards, it would be one thing if we lost and we weren’t good enough and it was something we can’t control,” Scheyer said. “I feel like everything here is what we can control. I really do. This group can do it. We just have to learn from this.”
It’s not the first time the loser in this game had to regroup, but it was the first time since 2012 that the result mattered at the top of the standings. Coincidence or not, the temperature ran higher.
There was the usual exchange of body blows, as always, with North Carolina racing out to a 21-6 lead and Duke fighting back to pull within one in the second half before the Tar Heels held off the Blue Devils at the end. Duke was within single digits for the final six minutes, but could never close the gap. That’s not surprising. But there was so much more, and some of it was atypically nasty.
Ryan was shushing and taunting the fans from the start, on his way to a career-high 31 points that put him in the same sentence as Jamison and Davis, and pointing at them afterward amid the hurling of debris. He scored 28 here for Notre Dame three years ago, and again embraced the enmity. Whatever the Duke students gave him, he gave right back.
“That’s just who I am and I can’t control it,” Ryan said. “I love playing in these environments. I love being in front of the fire. I love it. I know these guys love it too.”
There was plenty of fire. In the first half, Kyle Filipowski got tangled with Harrison Ingram on the floor and appeared to stick out his right leg and trip Ingram as Ingram tried to run up the court. Reminiscent of Allen’s hip trip of Garrison Brooks in the 2018 ACC semifinal in Brooklyn, this Flip trip somehow escaped scrutiny at the instant-replay monitor in a sport where the officials review every cough and sneeze, which left the principals making their cases afterward.
Ingram: “I feel like he tripped me, but I’m not really sure. I thought he did. I’m not sure if it was a basketball play or not. I haven’t really seen the video, but you know, I’ll see it.”
Filipowski: “I’m not really too sure how that whole situation happened, to be honest. I was really just getting up. My foot slipped. I don’t know how I caught him. That’s really all I got. I didn’t see him coming from anywhere. I didn’t even know he was back with me. I thought I was the only one left.”
Inadvertent or otherwise, that incident seemed to wake up Duke, and Filipowski in particular. He started the second half outscoring North Carolina by himself over the first five minutes, dragging the Blue Devils back into the game.
In the end, the victors write history, and Bacot backed up his talk that the ACC title went through him, even if neither he nor presumptive ACC player of the year R.J. Davis was a factor Saturday in securing their long-awaited banner. On the contrary, it was North Carolina’s array of weapons that proved decisive.
“Those are the kind of games you’re going to win in March,” Davis said. “They may be ugly, but we need everybody.”
Ryan, deemed “psychotic” by several of his teammates, was so hot that Bacot said UNC started “putting him in R.J. positions.” Cadeau beat the shot clock in the final minute with an impromptu tribute to Paige’s second-to-last shot in Houston. Ingram’s versatility. And North Carolina stopped the bleeding in the second half thanks to the defensive work of Jae’Lyn Withers and Seth Trimble.
As good as Filipowski and Jared McCain and Tyrese Proctor and Mark Mitchell are, North Carolina has so many more ways to beat you. It’s a recipe that bodes well for March, and the Tar Heels insist, after their first regular-season title since 2019, their first outright since 2017, they’re not done yet. The regular season indeed ran through them.
As the No. 1 seed, so will next week’s festivities in Washington, something Bacot this time left unsaid.
“If we win the tournament,” Bacot said, “I’ll talk a little more.”
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