Right to the end, to his final steps off the basketball court as N.C. State coach, Mark Gottfried was leaning on Dennis Smith.
They bet it all on each other, the coach and NBA-bound point guard, and they ended up losing. The coach lost his job. The player lost 10 of his final 11 college games, exiting with the lowest-scoring game of his college career, scoring seven points in a desultory 75-61 loss to Clemson.
But they did it together, start to finish, inseparable both in the anticipation that grew as long as a year ago, when Smith and Terry Henderson and Torin Dorn laid plans to come to the rescue, and in the disappointment that surrounded the season’s premature but inevitable end, on a Tuesday afternoon in Brooklyn in front of a few thousand people.