Honest question, if Laettner doesn’t hit that shot in 1992, who still has them in their top 3?
In that case I doubt they'd even be in my top 5.
As it is I've got them as a strong number 1 personally.
Which is weird when I think about it.
The only meaningful game they ever took from us was one Elite Eight game.
UCONN sent us home from the Final Four once and from the title game once. Both relatively recently, at least compared to that Duke loss. And on UCONN I'm frankly mixed between thinking Hurley is a dick and wishing we could have been just like them the past 25 years.
Now it's true, I did love Mashburn and The Unforgettables more than I loved our '11 or '14 teams.
But not by so very much. Especially not vs that Knight/Lamb/Jones/Liggins/Harrelson squad.
But I guess I'd have to go with that as the reason I detest Duke so much—that they took the '92 Final Four and likely title away from us and broke The Unforgettables' hearts.
And maybe also just because we came so incredibly close to beating them then that we had even believed we had already beaten them. For the length of one timeout.
It has to be one of those. Because it's true: Unlike UCONN, Duke also has general ratface douchebaggery, the mysterious Lance Thomas free pass, floor slapping, cross-dressing, the tripper, Zion's "The University of Duke" shenanigans, Zion's house, abject terror of playing outside Cameron Indoor, and a seemingly unending array of (subjectively) convenient seeding/scheduling anomalies and (subjectively) more-than-typically-questionable calls to account for.
But if I'm honest, all those things justify my loathing of that program and surely aggravate it. But I don't think they really cause my loathing of them. It's there without any of that. In fact, in a strange way I doff my hat to them for all that other stuff. If you're gonna be a villain, why not go for broke and be a real, iconic, generationally-hateable larger than life movie villain? Imo Duke has done a bang-up job of that.
