The final March of Coach K

NOVEMBER UNFOLDED IN a dream.

Duke went out to Las Vegas at the end of the month and beat Gonzaga. Coach K saw hints of greatness, as a young team arrived in a big game, in a big venue, and instead of being scared of the stage, it grew to fit and claim it. This flickering vision of what these Blue Devils might be, were capable of becoming, flashed bright and then would fade through the teeth of winter.

Coach K told his players his own hoops doxology: Every season is a lifetime.

“You get one shot at this,” he told his team.

Out in Vegas, Mike and Mickie saw their friend Elaine Wynn, the casino baron. They’ve known her since Duke beat her beloved UNLV in 1991 and she loved how respectful he was after the game, refusing to buy into the narrative that this was a battle of good versus bad. She’s been a great friend and a regular visitor to Cameron. Elaine loves how basketball for the Krzyzewskis is a family sport. She tells stories about going to games in Durham and seeing the three daughters lugging babies and diaper bags and bottles into the tight confines of the arena’s old wooden bleachers and wondered why in the world anyone would go to all this trouble to watch their dad and granddad work. Of course she gets it. “When you have a man that is so invested in a passion,” she says, “you either get on the train or you’re completely off the train and you won’t have a lot.”

Along with her ex-husband, Steve Wynn, she created some of the great Las Vegas properties, including the Bellagio. Once she ate there with the Krzyzewskis, after she no longer owned it, and little mistakes bothered her. She told Coach K that it took her a long time to understand it wasn’t her casino any longer. Then she smiled and said one day he’d have to deal with the same thing as he handed his program to someone else.

She visited Krzyzewski before the Gonzaga game, because the team always stays at the Wynn, but just briefly to say hello. He was there on business, she says. After the game,…