The Blue Devils did something unthinkable on Sunday afternoon — they actually made me like them. Conditioned on three decades of familial loathing, I walked into the Lenovo Center in Raleigh prepared to be wrapped in Duke’s weighted blanket of disgust, lulling me into a comfortable state of hatred. Instead I found myself falling in love with this iteration of the team.
We don’t need to re-litigate the reasons to hate Duke. It’s a talking point which comes up every March, with no shortage of think pieces about race, privilege, and the Blue Devils embracing their role as college basketball’s “villains” to become emblematic of brilliance and distain simultaneously.
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