The legacy of the this season’s Duke Blue Devils has been affirmed and the record books will forever remember Coach K’s band of youngsters as the 2015 National Champions. His was a talented group that was very good in November and great by April, completing a transformation that left them fully deserving of the esteemed opinions that will forever accompany them. One could even make a case that this team was as good or better than any National Champion in the last decade; the Blue Devils may not have been perfect, but they proved elite in a top-heavy year that included several great teams. The funny thing is, though, that when we think back on the this college basketball season in 20 years, NOBODY will begin the conversation with Duke. From November 14 until April 4, the only story in college basketball was Kentucky. Mike Krzyzewski’s club managed to steal the spotlight just in time for championship Monday, but even the Blue Devils’ historic season will be viewed through the prism of Kentucky’s unfulfilled chase of perfection. It says here that history will be kind to those Wildcats.
The Blue Devils Are Deserving National Champions, But Duke’s Title Doesn’t Mean Kentucky’s Historic Season Will Be Soon Forgotten
Chatter about John Calipari’s platoon system dominated the early November college basketball news cycle in both Lexington and nationally. The early success of his team’s five-for-five substitutions included a 32-point pasting of Kansas and a dominant dissection of UCLA (remember when Kentucky held 28-2 and 43-7 leads against the Bruins en route to a 39-point win?) and did NOTHING to shift the spotlight off of Cal’s ‘Cats. It wasn’t as if compelling storylines weren’t emerging elsewhere — the Jahlil Okafor/Frank Kaminsky National Player of the Year race was well underway by the end of 2014; as was Virginia’s program-validating opening surge (12-0 in 2014 would eventually become 19-0 by late January), while Arizona, Villanova and Northern Iowa were all busy laying groundwork for their wildly successful seasons to come. Interesting things were happening all across the college basketball landscape, but we couldn’t take our eyes off of the doings in Lexington. This Wildcats’ season reeked of history from the get-go.
Kentucky’s season ended somewhere short of history on Saturday night, or at least the kind of history that the Wildcats had envisioned making. Just seven days after winning the most watched college basketball game in cable television history, Kentucky lost the most watched Final Four game in 19 years. The sudden and dramatic presence of a number other than zero in the loss column ended the coupled dreams of both perfect season and national title, but the magnitude of fans following the Kentucky experience made one thing very clear: These Wildcats had already made history. John Calipari certainly thought so: “This season is historic,” he said. “I just can’t believe anybody is going to do what these kids just did to get to this point unblemished with the schedule they played, then how they did it.”
The Wildcats weren’t playing in Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday night, but Kentucky’s role in the narrative of this season didn’t disappear as suddenly as its own prospects did. Kentucky couldn’t have been far from the minds of Wisconsin’s players, who were forced to get over the mental hurdle of having already conquered their sternest test. Meanwhile, irony was also celebrated on the championship podium, as Duke raised the trophy with the help of a youthful foundation not so dissimilar from Calipari’s annual blueprint. Coach K had meshed a talented group of freshmen into college basketball’s biggest winner, with little concern for their longevity as Blue Devils. Sound familiar?
In the wake of Wisconsin’s Saturday stunner, some observed that Kentucky’s “pursuit of history had ended.” The lost opportunity at a perfect season undoubtedly diminished the ‘Cats all-time potential, but their pursuit of history had actually already ended prior to Indianapolis. Somewhere between Lexington — the site of Kentucky’s season opening 85-45 victory over Grand Canyon — and Cleveland, where the Wildcats outlasted Notre Dame in an NCAA Tournament-defining epic, Calipari’s team had already nabbed a place in history. A college basketball team more talented than nearly every one that had come before it meshed in a spectacularly seamless way, and the result through 38 games was historic. Congratulations remain in order for Duke, but recall of this year in college basketball will forever center around three digits and a dash: 38-1.