San Antonio — From their seats seven rows behind Duke’s bench, Ralph and Kelly Flagg had the perfect vantage point of the moment everything turned to dust.
With eight seconds left in Saturday’s national semifinal against No. 1 Houston, their son Cooper rose up for the turnaround jumper that legacies are made of. Sink it, and Duke’s in the national championship game for the first time in a decade. But miss it? Everything, over. Immediately.
The teams traded baskets thereafter, Flagg’s perfect free-throw shooting — he was eight-for-eight from the line — dueling against Sharp’s marksmanship. After Tugler earned an administrative technical foul with 1:14 to play, for slapping the ball out of James’ hands before the Duke guard inbounded it, Kon Knueppel sank a free throw that pushed the Blue Devils’ lead back to six.
Cooper Flagg untucked his Blue Devils jersey and lifted his white undershirt up to his chin, grasping for something while everything else slipped out of his reach. His top-seeded Blue Devils led for nearly the entire game, including by nine points with 2:06 left. Even a six-point cushion with 34 seconds left was not enough for the top-ranked Blue Devils and their starting five full of future NBA studs to hold off the relentless Coogs.
The opportunity of a lifetime, evaporating via a 9-0 Houston run in the final 33 seconds of the Final Four. Scheyer, and Duke, will never shake the sting of what transpired on Saturday night in San Antonio.
“You’re an inch away from the national championship game,” Scheyer said after. “You go from some of the most special moments in the tournament to the most heartbreaking loss. … There’s a lot of pain that comes with this.”
The play-by-play reads more graphic than some of Stephen King’s horror novels. The unraveling began with just over two minutes to play, after a Flagg 3-pointer and subsequent volleyball spike of a block gave Duke a nine-point lead and all the momentum. At that point, Kelly climbed onto her seat to see above the crowd around her, and started high-fiving anyone in arm’s reach. But then Houston guard Emanuel Sharp hit a contested layup, and on the other end, Tyrese Proctor had the ball poked away by Houston big JoJo Tugler. Sion James, Proctor’s backcourt mate, immediately walked over and told Proctor to “get over it” — but the avalanche, it turned out, was already underway.
“Just be Cooper,” James said of Duke’s final play design. “We trust him, and that’s 100 times out of 100.”
In that final timeout, Scheyer looked his team in the eyes and delivered what would prove to be his final in-game message all season: “Right f—ing now, go take it. Are you ready?”
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