The UNC faithful was ready for Coach K’s final appearance in Chapel Hill. He was, too

The first of Duke’s two buses pulled into the back ramp of the Smith Center on Saturday afternoon at exactly 4:12, about two hours before the Blue Devils’ game against North Carolina. A line of Tar Heels fans peered over a ledge from above, watching and waiting to voice their discontent with visitors they found particularly unwelcome.

Duke’s assistants stepped off the bus first. Nolan Smith and Chris Carrawell. Jon Scheyer, Duke’s head coach to be and its future, after this season. And then there he appeared, Mike Krzyzewski, walking into a game in this building for the 36th and final time. He held a couple notebooks in his left hand, gripped the side of the bus with his right and stepped down.

A loud chorus of boos greeted him. The people who most love to hate him were ready. So was he.

“I got what I expected,” he said about four hours later, a victor in his final trip to Chapel Hill — or at least his last in which almost 22,000 people came to see him lose. In his final go of it here, they booed him. They chanted profanity at him. And eventually they walked out with several minutes remaining, the Blue Devils’ 87-67 victory well in hand.

“I’m always ready for it,” Krzyzewski said of the enthusiastic greeting he received.

He added a small laugh and a smirk. Throughout a cold day in Chapel Hill, there’d been the kind of energy and anticipation that only comes once a year in this town. It was absent a year ago, when the pandemic forced the Blue Devils and Tar Heels to carry on their neighborly feud in front of mostly-empty arenas, but it returned Saturday.

Chapel Hill abuzz on game day

By noon, a little more than six hours before tip-off, restaurants along Franklin Street were clogged, along with the sidewalks themselves. A line of folks waited for a booth at Sutton’s, or a spot at the lunch counter near the pharmacy in the back. Farther down Franklin, students were already sitting outside of Sup Dogs, lining up to claim a seat just to watch the game on the big screens inside.

A walk down Franklin Street revealed small, inhospitable odes to Krzyzewski in his final game in Chapel Hill: the chalkboard outside of Goodfellows, the underground bar, that said, succinctly: “Krzyzewski ain’t Krzit.” At least a couple of people were wearing shirts bearing the same message. And speaking of shirts, one shop was selling one with Krzyzewski’s face featured on a Mount Rushmore, of sorts.

Except, in this version, it wasn’t a sign of reverence as much as something else — a Rushmore of Duke-associated men some might find objectionable, with Kzyzewski’s portrait, unflattering, opposite that of Richard Nixon and Stephen Miller. People walked past and took pictures of it.

By 3 p.m., Franklin Street was about as crowded as it ever gets — not including the annual Halloween festivities, or the gatherings that follow memorable victories, the kind that people here were hoping for on Saturday. Around campus, music thumped from fraternity parties, which had been going for a while.

In the moments before tip-off, the Smith Center became the loudest, most pulsating version of itself. A tunnel of photographers extended out onto one corner of the court, waiting for Krzyzewski to walk into the arena. The booing began as soon as he became visible. Krzyzewski clapped twice, bowed his head and walked straight ahead.

Seconds later, the students started a three-word chant, if the letter K could be considered a word. The final two words of the chant were “Coach K.” The first began with an F. It was not “farewell.” Unfazed, Krzyzewski walked in front of the UNC bench, shook hands with a couple of the Tar Heels’ assistants and prepared for the start.

Silencing the masses

About five minutes after it began, Duke held a 19-5 lead. It remained in the double-digits, and grew as large as 28 points in the final minutes. By then, a lot of the people who’d walked in here most hoping to see Krzyzewski lose his final game in Chapel Hill had already left. The Smith Center had become quiet and much emptier.

Since he announced last spring that this would be his final season, Krzyzewski has tried to avoid framing moments as his “last” of anything. He has often deflected questions seeking deeper introspection and perspective into his 42 seasons, usually answering that the time to reflect will come later, after it’s all over, instead of now.

Yet after this, his 17th and final victory in this building, Krzyzewski didn’t necessarily have to describe what it meant. His players were there to do that for him, as they were there to overmatch the Tar Heels throughout 40 minutes that, in the context of this rivalry, were uncharacteristically one-sided.

“It was more than just about us and Carolina,” Wendell Moore, Duke’s junior forward and team captain, said after he finished with 13 points and eight rebounds in a team-high 33 minutes. “I mean, obviously it was about Coach. His last time coming to Carolina, we wanted to send him out with a win, because he definitely deserves it.”

Never easy at UNC

For Krzyzewski, it was the kind of easy victory that belied how difficult these short ventures to Chapel Hill had been for him over the years. Regardless of the outcome Saturday, he was already guaranteed a losing record in the Smith Center (now 17-19) and in Chapel Hill overall (18-23). His teams had endured some sound beatings in this town over the years: by 24 points in 1998; by 21 in 1983; by 19 in 1990 and two other times by 18 points, including one just a year ago.

The 20-point margin of victory on Saturday, though, tied for the second-largest for a Krzyzewski-coached Duke team in Chapel Hill. Only a 29-point victory, in 2002, was more lopsided, and few could’ve been sweeter for Krzyzewski given it came in his final appearance. As a young coach, he lost his first four games in Chapel Hill, part of an overall stretch of Duke futility in which the Blue Devils lost 18 consecutive games here.

Krzyzewski broke through at UNC, at last, in 1985 — in the final time the Blue Devils played at Carmichael Auditorium. When the Smith Center opened one season later, Duke was the guest of honor, if it could be called such a thing, for the inaugural game. The Tar Heels won that one by three points, and beat Duke seven straight here in the mid-1990s.

In more recent years, though, Krzyzewski and his teams have felt more at home in enemy territory. Not all the time. But certainly in certain years and certain moments, like Saturday night. It was a night in which the crowd here, at capacity, desperately yearned for reason to become as loud during the game as it was in the moments before. The Blue Devils never obliged.

“We love being the villain,” Moore said. “We love playing on the road, we love when the whole stadium’s against us because we know we can silence the crowd.

“I mean, there’s no better feeling than really silencing the opponent’s crowd.”

Saying goodbye

In the final minutes, Duke’s lead grew to 28. It looked for a moment like the Blue Devils might win by a wider margin than Krzyzewski ever had here. He emptied his bench, though, and the Tar Heels made the final slightly more respectable — but not before Krzyzewski sent his grandson, former walk-on Michael Savarino, to the scorer’s table to check in. The final buzzer sounded with Savarino dribbling out the clock, encouraging those who remained to boo a little louder.

“I just wanted to get my grandson in my last game,” Krzyzewski said, slipping for once and acknowledging the kind of last he has been hesitant to recognize. He knew this one was different, though, given the history. For most of his 42 years at Duke, he has measured his program against the one less than 10 miles down the road.

He first built Duke into what it became when Dean Smith was still in his prime at UNC, and then Krzyzewski went back-and-forth against Roy Williams who, like Smith, became another Hall of Famer, same as Krzyzewski. Williams, in 2015, created a bit of a stir here when he decided UNC would honor Krzyzewski after he’d won his 1,000th game. Part of the reasoning, Williams said then, was to thank Krzyzewski for how Duke honored Smith upon his death earlier that year.

There was no such formal recognition on Saturday for Krzyzewski’s final appearance here. There was only a full house that desperately wanted to see him lose. There were the loud boos and the unkind profanity, early, and there was the quiet that came later. Moments after his press conference ended, Krzyzewski was already on the bus. It pulled out about 4 1/2 hours after it had arrived, after the people who’d jeered its arrival had long left.

This story was originally published February 5, 2022 at 11:25 PM with the headline "The UNC faithful was ready for Coach K’s final appearance in Chapel Hill. He was, too."

Andrew Carter

The News & Observer

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Andrew Carter spent 10 years covering major college athletics, six of them covering the University of North Carolina for The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer. Now he’s a member of The N&O’s and Observer’s statewide enterprise and investigative reporting team. He attended N.C. State and grew up in Raleigh dreaming of becoming a journalist.