Former UNC guard Caleb Love was always going to be the villain. Friday, he was a hero, too
The ball hung in midair, the game up for grabs with it. Duke’s final halfcourt heave landed in the arms of the player who so often had been the Blue Devils’ foil, only in a different uniform.
The play that sealed Arizona’s win Friday night was made by a player who is no stranger to Cameron, the final poetic touch on a game that got as close to epic as November can.
It had everything. Two power programs with April aspirations. A hero. A villain. A stage worthy of the moment and a moment worthy of the stage.
As it played out, the hero and the villain were one and the same.
Caleb Love came back to Durham and left, for the final time, the way he had twice before with North Carolina. With a win.
Photos: Arizona defeats Duke in a Top 25 men’s basketball game
“Obviously, it was on my mind for a minute,” Love said. “As soon as I saw that they were on the schedule, my eyes got bigger. But we came in and we handled business. That’s all that matters.”
It wasn’t a vintage Love game, not like he so often produced against Duke in his time at North Carolina, but he was there at the finish of both halves — blocking a shot and banking in a 3-pointer to end the first, a perfect 4-for-4 at the free throw line in the final 18 seconds before playing defensive back to seal the 78-73 victory.
The writers’ strike is over. It’s not supposed to be this obvious.
“I’m not a ‘scripter,’ ” Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd said. “I just try to coach the game as it plays out in front of me. I’m not surprised he made (those plays). I told him he deserved that moment.”
More of this, please
There wasn’t much space for Love, or anyone else, because this was, in the preferred vernacular of the former Duke coach seated courtside, a man’s game — furious in its intensity, especially on defense, and a demilitarized zone in the paint. It was a heavyweight battle befitting the stakes, the first matchup of top-25 teams this season.
College basketball needs more of this, please, because the folks who don’t tune in until March would find everything about this very familiar — with the added bonus of being played in a frenzied home-court environment. At a time when many of the best nonconference games of the college basketball season are played in half-empty NBA arenas and hotel ballrooms or high-school gyms on faraway islands, Duke and Arizona embraced the old ways and everyone was rewarded.
This had the same feel of those epic mid-’90s Duke-Michigan games, always played in Cameron or Crisler, each program embracing the challenge and rewards of going on the road and defending its home court. Or North Carolina-Kentucky in more recent years when that series rotated between Chapel Hill and Lexington, for that matter. This used to be the rule, not the exception, and the sport is poorer for it.
“We’re going back to their place next year and hopefully it’s a great thing for the sport,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “And more important, our team.”
Given all that, the anticipation for this game had been building long before Love ended up at Arizona. That certainly didn’t detract from it.
Love was famously the victor in his two most important meetings with Duke as a North Carolina player, helping ruin Mike Krzyzewski’s Cameron farewell — the old coach was back in the building for just the second game since then, sitting along the baseline with his wife, Mickie — and delivering the decisive shot in the long-awaited, long-feared Final Four collision in New Orleans, sending Krzyzewski into retirement and the Tar Heels into the championship game.
Still the enemy in Durham
His return to Chapel Hill was more fraught, and while Armando Bacot and R.J. Davis returned again this fall to atone for last season’s collapse, Love sought new pastures — abortively, in Ann Arbor, before arriving in Arizona — exiting in a cloud of whispered blame. Whatever the circumstances, Love took the high road Friday night. He talked to a few of his former teammates, he said. They told him to go get the win.
“Regardless of what our differences are or what happened in the past,” Love said, “I’ve still got love for Tar Heel nation.”
Speaking of what happened in the past, it was hard to figure in advance how the Duke students would receive him, as the player who denied their team a shot at the national title two years ago? Or the one often furtively cited as a main reason for their rival’s unprecedented (and, in their quarters, savored) struggles last winter?
The answer: With a loud chorus of boos. Two years may be an eternity in the mind of the modern college student — in the revolving-door world of modern college basketball — but some slights are not easily or soon forgotten.
Love was far from the deciding factor in the game, but he was still impossible not to notice, even long before the end whether it was stuffing Mark Mitchell’s desperation 3-pointer back in his face late in the first half before a clanging, leaning 3 to give the Wildcats an eight-point halftime lead, or suffering the derision of the students when he dribbled the ball off his foot for one of his six turnovers.
His 11 points were not only his fewest of any of his four visits to Cameron, but eight of his nine career games against Duke. His career record against the Blue Devils is a sterling 7-2, and sometimes, things have just gone his way — like his heave at the end of the first half.
“I was just trying to make a play,” Love said. “But that was a bull---- shot.”
Less noticeable was the message written in black Sharpie on the heel of Love’s right shoe: “Tar Heel 4L.” His uniform may have changed. His feelings toward Duke, and his results against the Blue Devils, have not.
He waved goodbye to the Duke students at the end, a final if unexpected farewell. A game that had everything, that meant so much more than so many, had the memorable ending it deserved.
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