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Today being Amanda’s day off, she gladly got Milly up this morning when she woke up.  Milly was pretty cheery, as she usually is in the morning.

After doing a bit of work I headed out to run a couple errands, including picking up some jumper cables.  I was planning on driving to Seth Holloman’s place this afternoon, but to do that I had to go ahead and get my car running.  I hadn’t started it in quite a while, and when my car lies dormant it somehow uses up its battery charge.  Anyway, I was going to get a medium grade cable, but they only had low and high grade cables.  I didn’t want to spend too much so I got a lower grade one.  Didn’t do the trick, of course, so I called Seth and asked if he’d pick me up.

Amanda was going to take Milly by her work and dressed her all in pink for the occasion.  Pink shirt, pink pants, pink socks, pink jacket and pink bow.  They left at about 3:00 and Seth and his dad came to pick me up at about 3:45.  We stopped to pick up Randal Kennedy, another Duke fan, then, after a quick stop at BoJangle’s and a close call that nearly gave Randal a heart attack, we continued on to Durham where we met up with Seth’s aunt and uncle (I believe).

I met Tedder, another guy from the Duke board, and his wife.  Seth and I also talked to another guy, Paul, who is the one who is providing us with tickets to next week’s football game.  After a bit Seth and I went back to our seats.

We had some really sweet seats, I must say.  In Cameron there are two levels- on the floor and the upper level.  We were right at the very front of the upper level, which probably wasn’t more than 15-20 feet up from the hardwood.  Aside from being at midcourt we couldn’t have asked for much better seats.

This was the first basketball event I’ve been to at Duke since 1995 or 1996, so I was pumped to be there.  I wasn’t disappointed either.  The Countdown to Craziness is Duke’s (hopefully annual) basketball season kickoff.  This had some skits and games put on by the students prior to the Countdown, then they showed some pretty funny videos by the team.

After that Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley were introduced as guest coaches for the Blue-White scrimmage and the players were all introduced to their own individually-picked music.  Brian Zoubek came out dancing to Ice Ice Baby and Job Scheyer came out to All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers.  It was the “I got soul but I’m not a soldier” part.

The Blue-White scrimmage featured two halves, or games, really, with two different teams.  In the first one it was the presumed starters versus the rest of the team, and it was sort of a blowout.  They switched things up in the second, and even though Seth’s uncle and I both said we thought the white team would win, it ended up going to the second team.  It came down to the wire though, with Nolan Smith hitting two free throws to end a tie with less than a second left in the game.

After the scrimmage was a dunk contest.  Really, Olek Czyz should have won with his 360 between the legs tomahawk dunk, but they called the round a tie between him and Andre Dawkins and ended up giving them both the win after another round.  Nolan Smith unveiled an old-school Johnny Dawkins (no relation to Andre) jersey during the dunk contest.

The Plumlee brothers looked pretty good, Andre Dawkins looked good, of course Scheyer and Singler looked good, but I’ll give most improved to Nolan Smith.  Transfer Seth Curry looked pretty good after he got into his groove, but unfortunately we’ll have to wait until next year to see him in in-game action.

Here’s a pretty good video recap of the event.  you can actually see me and Seth towards the top left corner in all of the shots that are on the left side of the court that show the upper section.  I’m the last guy in the corner with a blue shirt on, and you can see me clapping a lot of the time.  Seth is to my left (camera right).

I got home… I don’t know, sometime after midnight.  Maybe close to 1:00?  Amanda wrote a good night message to me from Milly on the mirror in the bathroom, which was really sweet.

Zach Dotsey