GREENSBORO, N.C. — A year after the ACC tournament would not go on without Duke, it will go on without Duke.
The show will go on in Greensboro, even after the positive COVID-19 test that shut down the Blue Devils’ season for good on the eve of Thursday’s quarterfinal against Florida State, what would have been the biggest game of Duke’s season, with a win all but guaranteeing an NCAA Tournament berth.
Instead, Duke is done and everyone else has received a stark and unwanted reminder of just how fragile this entire operation is, this frantic rush to get through Greensboro and get to Indianapolis and complete the college basketball season, not that there weren’t enough reminders already.
Even if everything had gone perfectly this week, the virus was never far away, lurking in the not-too-distant corners of the mind. The digital signs welcoming the few thousand fans to the Greensboro Coliseum rotate between parking instructions for basketball, COVID-19 testing and COVID-19 vaccines. The players, coaches and staffs all have to wear Kinexon tracking devices anytime they leave their rooms to simplify contact-tracing precisely in situations like this.
“I don’t want to say they’re uncomfortable,” Florida State’s RaiQuan Gray said Thursday. “But it’s something new.”
It’s all new. That’s the problem at the heart of all of this. Everyone’s trying to do the best they can, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Duke’s decision to commute from Durham rather than stay in Greensboro amid a burgeoning campus outbreak that already shut down spring football practice will be second-guessed ad infinitum, and not without justification, but there wasn’t a team that played it any more safely throughout the season, isolating the basketball team at the Washington Duke, keeping Cameron free of any outside observers and even cutting off nonconference play in midstream.
“As many safeguards as we implemented,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said in a statement, “no one is immune to this terrible virus.”
While the larger ethical questions of whether keeping college athletes sequestered in a luxury hotel for months are also open to debate, it did work for Duke — right up until the final and most important hurdle.
Almost one year to the hour — on the ACC calendar — from the moment Florida State was pulled off the floor and handed the championship trophy by default when Duke forced the ACC’s hand by suspending intercollegiate athletics, Florida State again advanced through the bracket by COVID-19 default, the ACC’s first-ever triple bye.
“We’ve never had to deal with anything like we’re facing,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said Thursday. “The most important thing is to get through this season as safe as possible and hope that we never have to deal with it again.”
Strictly in a basketball sense, the timing couldn’t have been worse for Duke. The Blue Devils had shown considerable progress in Greensboro, putting the blowout loss in Chapel Hill behind them and showing growth. Freshman center Mark Williams was setting records. The guards in particular played defense with both intention and structure against Louisville on Wednesday, perhaps the most positive development of all.
Not that it matters anymore. It all fell apart with one positive test, swept off the court and into the record books, for good.
There’s a little history still on the line: Other than last year, for obvious reasons, there’s never been an ACC tournament without a team from North Carolina in the semifinals.
Wake Forest went out on Tuesday. N.C. State went out on Wednesday. Duke is out now.
North Carolina, which plays Virginia Tech late Thursday night, is the last hope of the Old North State to avoid setting a new precedent in another ACC tournament that’s already without precedent.
