What you will hear after this game is that Carolina-Duke is always incredible, that it always delivers, that it is the unquestioned best rivalry in all of sports.
I am here to tell you that sometimes it is the worst. The worst of everything.
What makes it so maddening is that sometimes it is the best and sometimes it is the worst all in the same game. When that Dickens guy wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," I think he must have been sitting courtside at the Smith Center.
Intellectually I understand that there have to be games like this, that it is not Carolina-Duke without them, and that you have to suffer through some like this in order to be able to appreciate the inevitable victories.