Since news of Mike Krzyzewski’s retirement broke Wednesday, which will happen after the upcoming season, people have gotten highly sentimental and there is a tendency, understandable though it is, to see the Krzyzewski era as perfect and inevitable.
It’s easy to look back now and believe that but it was never inevitable. In fact, if it weren’t for Tom Butters, who Coach K thanked for believing in him in his Thursday press conference, the game we are featuring today, the Duke-UNC game to close out the 1982-83 regular season, might have been the second-to-last game that Mike Krzyzewski coached at Duke.