DURHAM, N.C. — Thirty minutes before North Carolina’s game at Duke on Saturday night, it was quiet enough outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium to hear the wind rustling through the pines, quiet enough to hear the sound of drizzle falling on the sidewalk.
It was quiet enough to hear voices from across the large grass rectangle better known as “Krzyzewskiville,” where a few students came by because they couldn’t help it. If they couldn’t camp out and if they couldn’t be inside they at least had to visit. Some just milled about and stared at everything that was gone.
“Pretty depressing, to be honest,” was how Connor Penny described it. He’s a senior at Duke, and he’d come to campus with his three roommates Saturday afternoon just to take in the spectacle of a deserted Duke campus on the night of a Duke-UNC game.
“For me, it didn’t really hit until we actually just got back here and it was, like, empty,” Penny said, standing on top of a two-tiered big wooden bench, looking around at all the spaces that’d be packed with people but now, instead, were wide open. “Really sad.”
By now we’re about 11 months into a pandemic that has changed every aspect of American life. In ways large and small we’ve grown accustomed to going without. We’ve grown desensitized, to an extent, to the number of people who’ve died; to stories of great loss.
Through Saturday, 9,926 North Carolinians have died from complications related to the virus. That’s about 600 more people than Cameron Indoor Stadium’s capacity of 9,314. On Saturday night, you could’ve put a North Carolina virus victim’s name in every blue seat, and in every spot on those old wooden bleachers, and you’d still run out of room for those in this state who were alive last year but aren’t now because of COVID-19.
That’s but one image that offers some perspective of our times. Another was Duke’s campus itself, which one of Penny’s friends described as a “ghost town.” (And not necessarily just on a basketball game night.)
“It’s one of the most historic college basketball rivalries and you look in front of Cameron where they’re playing in 30 minutes and we’re literally the only people here right now,” said Griffin McDaniel, another senior. Another group had just left, departing in time to watch tip-off somewhere else.
Even after all these months, the weirdness of sports in a pandemic has not subsided. The emptiness of most arenas. The not-so socially distanced crowds at others. The ways TV networks and teams and schools attempt to make things feel a little less strange but only add to the strangeness of the whole thing.
By now, on the other side of this, it’s going to take some getting used to not seeing those plastic sheets covering rows of unoccupied sections. Or the cardboard cutouts stuck into prime seats, a lot of them wearing eerie, frozen smiles that lend to the sense of the bizarre.
Nothing about that aspect of Duke-UNC felt different Saturday night. It was a made-for-TV event, in a literal way, with all the usual trappings of pandemic sports broadcasts. And yet it felt different, still, because it was Duke-UNC, and because that one game always feels different in Durham, at Cameron.
Television only ever does the noise and the energy so much justice. On game days, hours before tipoff, the pregame scene can be heard before it can be seen. The sound of house music thumping from across campus. The sound of impromptu “Go to hell Carolina” chants breaking out in the distance.
It’s like a daylong mosh pit, kids slathering themselves in blue paint and doing things their parents probably wouldn’t be proud of. Carolina fans will roll their eyes, and a lot of them might mock the thought that the atmosphere in and around Cameron for Duke-UNC is all that special.
Yet they know it’s true. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have as much fun despising Duke.
The scene Saturday offered a glimpse of what college basketball’s greatest rivalry would be without spectators. What it’d be if Cameron Indoor was silenced. More importantly, it offered another reminder of what’s been lost throughout the past 11 months.
The last Duke-UNC game before Saturday was March 7, 2020. Days before, North Carolina officials confirmed the state’s first case of the virus. There were quiet rumblings then of changes that could be coming, but no one had any idea.
Before that game, the head coaches, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and UNC’s Roy Williams, tapped elbows instead of shaking hands. It was almost like a joke — a playful nod and a wink to something nobody understood. Within a week, the college basketball season was over. The state began shutting down.
Almost a year later, a deserted college campus on Saturday night offered another reminder, as if we need any, of how much further there is to go. It was another installment of college basketball’s greatest rivalry, and only essential personnel were allowed inside.
There were no tents. No music. No chants. No youthful energy and indiscretion. Outside of Cameron Indoor, blotches of blue paint still stained the sidewalks. A few small groups of students walked by, slowly, as if they wanted to see what they were missing, or remember what they’d experienced.
A couple of seniors took laps outside. Stephanie Crater and David Miron had painted their faces in blue and white stripes. Miron wore a furry blue wig. Crater carried around a portable speaker blaring “Everytime We Touch,” which, in any other year, would’ve sent Duke students into a frenzy moments before tip-off.
This year, she played it on a loop while she and her friend jogged around Cameron.
“Can’t not be in K-Ville on game day,” she said.
“It’s just not the same,” he said.
Inside, the game went on while campus grew even quieter and emptier.
