I feel much better today.

I stopped by The Connection to have a short meeting with Scott today. He is considering leasing me a MacBook. I was saving up for one anyway, but if he wants to do that, it’d be fine with me. He’s also pretty certain he’ll get us some iPhones at some point. He wants to get one first to see how well it will work for us, then if it passes his inspection he’ll go for more. We interviewed a guy to possibly help out with some of the sales. For a while we’ve wanted someone who can call up existing clients and tell them about services we have that could benefit them. We’ve got lots of people who have been with us for a long time, but they don’t know all that we’re capable of anymore. If it’s online, we either do it or we’re working on doing it.
We didn’t have small group tonight. Rob had heard of a benefit concert raising money for a guy who had fallen on hard times and, since it didn’t seem like there was much to last week’s sermon’s discussion, I figured it’d be nice to go. Amanda still wasn’t feeling 100% and didn’t think it’d do her much good to stand around in a loud place, so we stayed home for the night.

Conveniently, there was a Duke game on tonight that I really wanted to watch. (It really had no bearing on our decision not to go to the concert- I was planning on DVRing the game.) Clemson had, I believe, the longest starting undefeated streak of the season, although they have since lost twice. They’re ranked at number 17, Duke at 10. It was a good test for Duke. The game was a really good one. Duke got up by a slim double digit lead at the half and after that was chipped away, I think the biggest margin was nine at around the 5:00 mark. There were a lot of stupid turnovers on both ends, but Duke killed Clemson on the boards with 40 rebounds versus the Tigers’ 24. Despite all this, in the last few seconds of the game Clemson was down five. They made a two then Josh McRoberts inbounded the ball right to a Clemson player who stepped back and made another three to tie the game. The refs took a minute to play with the clock a little.

This happened right at 9:00. We had two shows scheduled to record at that time slot so since I hadn’t canceled either one the screen went gray and switched to Supernatural on the CW. I hastily fiddled with the remote to cancel CSI (since we’d missed a few already anyway) then tried to get the station back on ESPN. For some reason I wasn’t thinking straight and started going up one by one going up the guide one channel at a time. Fortunately I did get there in time to see the ball inbounded to Jon Scheyer who dribbled it up to halfcourt and saw a very open David McClure sprinting for the basket with no defenders on him. Scheyer passed and McClure put up a soft layup. As the team ran out to congratulate McClure, announcer Len Elmore said skeptically, “I don’t know.” Looking at the replay, the ball left McClure’s hand with 0.1 seconds left. It was a hell of a game.

When I got on the message boards later tonight there was a whole bunch of buzz about the game. It turns out that when Josh McRoberts inbounded the ball to a Clemson player the clock didn’t start until the ball was almost back in the basket, which left Duke with more time to get down the court and score. Of course the people who think there’s some kind of Duke conspiracy are all over it.

Here are some things to consider:

-Duke wanted the clock to run out at that point, so not starting the clock gave Clemson an advantage.
-Clemson wouldn’t have won if Duke didn’t score that last shot- it would have gone into overtime. What would have happened there nobody knows.
-If Mike Krzyzewski had been presented with two seconds to inbound the ball and score instead of 4.4 seconds, he’d have drawn up a different plan.

Amanda had gone to bed in the second half. She fell asleep when Duke was up nine points or so and woke back up to see the whole ending series of events. She pointed out that last year when she was sick in bed watching the game was when Sean Dockery made the miracle three that saved Duke from being beat by Virginia Tech at home. She went on to tell me that I’m not allowed to wish for her to be sick during the upcoming Duke-Carolina game.

Zach Dotsey