The Blue Devils Made Me Do It

I went four years of college at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, without ever attending a basketball game. Before last weekend, I’d gone more than three and a half years on the faculty at Duke without watching its fabled team zip up and down the court. I figured I’m a football person and a movie buff and why cultivate an interest I don’t have time for? Besides, everyone around me zigged so far in the direction of obsession with the Blue Devils that I enjoyed zagging toward indifference. I’m ornery that way.

But on Saturday night, I relented. I found myself with a precious ticket for a prime midcourt seat at Duke’s home game against my alma mater, which is of course its archrival. Curiosity got the better of me.

I rooted for neither team. My solution to divided loyalties was to indulge none at all. Besides, I had so many impressions to process. Among them:

Nothing you’ve heard about the decibel level in Cameron Indoor Stadium prepares you for it. I felt it in my toenails. In my eyelashes. It’s pure aural adrenaline — so much so that if they raced garden slugs in a terrarium at center court, you’d be as enraptured as if watching Secretariat in his prime.

Cameron Indoor Stadium is a ridiculous name. There’s no outdoor Cameron, and it’s an arena. I tell my students to write precisely, and that’s the kind of counterexample the university sets?

Cameron is not the place to order white wine.

The most important people in the arena — at least in terms of keeping the players’ endoskeletons intact and the game from turning into some admixture of basketball and surfing — are the students who rush onto the court seemingly every five seconds and, on their hands and knees, towel up the players’ sweat. There are oceans of it, approximately half from the Duke wunderkind Cooper Flagg.

Flagg is the moistest athlete I’ve ever seen.

And he’s breathtaking. At one point early in the game, he raced the length of the court and, barely stopping to plant his feet, shot a perfect three-pointer. I tell people I favor football because there’s no athleticism like that of a wide receiver making a spectacular catch. I am wrong.