By Brendan Marks New York Times
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — During a timeout with 12:23 left to play in Saturday’s ACC tournament championship game, Duke coach Jon Scheyer leaned back in his black folding chair and took a breath.

His Blue Devils had just scored 7 straight points, their longest run all game, to take a 5-point lead in a game that featured eight first-half lead changes. But more importantly? Duke’s quick spurt, capped by a Sion James 3-pointer, helped Scheyer’s squad steal all the momentum inside Spectrum Center, so much so that Louisville coach Pat Kelsey was forced to call timeout.

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In his timeout huddle, Scheyer looked his team up and down, then laid out the road map to Duke’s second ACC tournament title in three seasons.

“The game,” he said, “is right here.”

As the buzzer blared for play to resume, Scheyer implored his team to check two simple boxes: Get a stop, then get a score. It only took Duke 24 seconds — Patrick Ngongba blocking Chucky Hepburn’s layup, and Tyrese Proctor draining his sixth 3-pointer on the other end — to do just that, the pivotal sequence in the Blue Devils’ 73-62 victory over Louisville.

With the win, Scheyer became the first coach to win the ACC tournament twice in his first three seasons leading a program. (NC State’s Everett Case won the first three ACC tournaments ever held, but he was in his seventh season with the Wolfpack when the ACC was founded.)

After Proctor’s 3, Kon Knueppel — who was named ACC tournament MVP — drew a goaltending call that made it a 12-0 run for Duke, the team’s first “kill shot” (a scoring run of double-digit unanswered points) all game. It proved to be the only one the Blue Devils needed.

“Let’s f—ing go,” Scheyer told his team in its next timeout, nursing a 10-point lead by then. “Just keep defending down there. … We’ve got it.”

Saturday’s victory was not only a testament to the Blue Devils’ talent but also a sign of their depth. Star freshman and national player of the year front-runner Cooper Flagg missed the semifinal and final with a sprained left ankle he suffered in the team’s quarterfinal opener against Georgia Tech. Forward Maliq Brown, arguably the team’s most versatile defender, also aggravated his sprained shoulder against the Yellow Jackets and did not play the rest of the week.

Down two of its top frontcourt players and defenders, Duke endured three straight slugfests to complete its first outright sweep of the ACC’s regular-season and tournament championships since 2006. The Blue Devils trailed by 14 against Georgia Tech but came back without Flagg behind Knueppel’s 20 second-half points. Then Duke got a third date with rival North Carolina, let a 24-point lead dwindle to 1 and had to eke out a win in the game’s final seconds after UNC lost its score-tying free-throw attempt with 4.1 seconds left due to a lane violation. Against Louisville, which went on a 7-0 run before halftime to take the lead at the break, Duke had to come from behind once again.

Leading the charge were Proctor, whose six 3s tied the most by a Blue Devil in a game all season, and Knueppel, who averaged 21 points this week and stepped seamlessly into Flagg’s role as Duke’s do-everything scorer.

But that timeout, and the run on either side of it, decided the Blue Devils’ fate.

And made them champions, again.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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