MICHAEL KIRAL / L’Observateur / March 29, 1999

The envelope please.

The nominations for the 1999 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship are: Connecticut, making its first Final Four appearance under coach Jim Calhoun.

Duke, looking to win its third title in the 1990s.

Michigan State, advancing to the Final Four for the first time since Magic Johnson led the 1979 Spartans to the NCAA title.

And Ohio State, making the Final Four a year after winning but one game in the Big 10.

The drum roll please.

And the winner is…The consensus choice is Duke, a team that hasn’t had even a speed bump on its road to St. Petersburg. The Blue Devils have won its games in thetournament by 41, 41, 17 and 21. Defensively-minded Temple wassupposed to give Duke all sorts of trouble in the East Regional finals Sunday. The Blue Devils barely blinked, rolling past the Owls, 85-64.Duke leads the nation by averaging 93.2 points per game. Its 26.1 averagemargin of victory also leads the country. The Blue Devils last lost inDecember and are currently riding a 31-game winning streak. Playing inperhaps the toughest conference in the country, Duke went unblemish, capturing both the regular season and tournament title.

But the Blue Devils and Mike Krzyzewski have seen first hand that there is no such thing as a sure thing. After all, it was Duke that upset supposedlyunbeatable UNLV in the Final Four in 1992 on its way to its first championship. That Running Rebels team had gone through the seasonundefeated and were looking to become the first team to repeat as national champs since the UCLA dynasty of the 1970s.

Georgetown was a consensus favorite when it met Villanova in the Finals in 1985. All Villanova did was make every shot it looked at in pulling offone of the biggest upsets in history. Four years later, the Hoyas werealmost involved in another major upset before holding off 16th-seeded Princeton in the first round.

And if the Blue Devils needed another lesson in that consensus favorites don’t always bring home the top honors, they just needed to look at events of this past week.

First, there was the Academy Awards on Sunday night. “Saving PrivateRyan” for months looked like a shoe-in for Best Picture. Even minutesbefore, after Steven Spielberg won Best Director honors for the movie, it looked like it would take the night’s most anticipated honor. Instead, itwas “Shakespeare in Love,” a late contender in the Best Picture field, that took the award.

Less than 24 hours later, the Duke players were personally on hand to witness another consensus favorite, the Tennessee Lady Vols, go down in flames. And ironically, it was the Duke women’s team that was doing theupsetting, stunning the top-ranked Lady Vols, 69-63.

The lesson the Blue Devils need to learn from all this? Take the scissors along with you, but take care of business before even thinking about cutting down the nets in St. Petersburg. All too often, sure things haveproved to be anything but.

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