No, he didn't see this coming, Krzyzewski said after Temple won, 78-73.
"If I saw it coming, I would have faked an illness, instead of getting ill during the game," Coach K said.
Who saw this coming? A close home win over Buffalo and a survival test at Delaware didn't offer any clues. The operative word for Temple fans this week seemed to be hope. As in they hoped the Owls stayed within range of Duke, that this would be a ball game to the last minute, which usually hadn't been the case when these two matched up in the past.
It had been almost 16 years since the last time the Owls beat Duke, in another test of toughness over at the Spectrum, nine meetings ago in 1996.
The toughness Duke's Hall of Fame coach referred to really wasn't physical toughness. Khalif Wyatt's two three-pointers, both contested, cracked the game open late. As the game moved along, it felt like less of an upset. Duke's guards played as young as they looked. Extending the Blue Devils' defense merely gave Temple's guards more room to operate, often resulting in a foul 30 feet from the hoop as Duke's guards struggled to stay in front of their Owls counterparts.
Big picture: This goes down as the biggest regular-season win of Fran Dunphy's career. Technically, Villanova was ranked higher two seasons ago when Temple beat the Wildcats. But nobody would claim that one equaled this one.
"They've won the Atlantic Ten three of the last four years," Krzyzewski said afterward. "It's not a team we're playing tonight, it's a program. Temple's always had a tradition here, with John [Chaney] and now with Dunph."
