In preemptive anticipation of Duke Elimination Day
By 
Preparing for the special event:
SOMETIME BETWEEN TODAY and never, Duke Blue Devils men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski will lose one more NCAA tournament game. If he does lose, it would be the 32nd time he has lost in the NCAA tournament, and the final time, and one of the more satisfying ones. Krzyzewski is retiring after this season, and with him will go one of the purest pleasures in sports, the pleasure of watching one of the game’s—the nation’s!—greatest sore losers lose, sorely.
Already, on his farewell tour, Krzyzewski has created one indelible joyous memory: getting pasted in his final home game by a bad and unranked North Carolina team, in what was supposed to be a celebratory walkover against Duke’s eternal archrival. The arena was full of worshipful fans and dozens of devoted ex-players and admiring national media, and the Tar Heels just clobbered the Blue Devils—Krzyzewski got outcoached, his team outhustled, however you might wish to describe it. He picked up a microphone afterward for a scheduled valedictory address and, in a classic Krzyzewski snit, declared the whole thing “unacceptable.”
It would be simplistic moralizing to say Krzyzewski didn’t take the Carolina game seriously enough, but the coach himself has spent three decades simplistically moralizing about success, so it’s only fair to go along with it. This is who he is, the man who gave his name to the Duke business school’s Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics while serving as a national avatar of bad sportsmanship.
The redeeming thing about overweening control freaks is that eventually, sometimes, they have to lose. And when they do, nothing else counts. The pinch-faced scowling and barking from the sidelines becomes not the hard price of greatness (paid, mostly, by his players) but a mere loop of misery feeding on itself. Their whole glowering sense of entitlement bursts open and the radiant light of comeuppance pours through.
If Michigan State wants to take care of it this weekend, all the better!