news-record.com

They'll begin the Final Four today in Indianapolis with the best team we saw all season up there playing for the best coach we've ever seen. Duke, and not anyone else in its state or its league, will try to do what no other program in the country is capable of doing.

And that's becoming, once again, the nation's team. And that's playing for, once again, the nation's coach.

Mike Krzyzewski has had better basketball teams, certainly the one he coached as recently as two summers ago. He's had better teams at Duke, certainly any number of those he's taken to the previous 10 Final Fours he's coached in. But he's never done a better job with a team than he did this year.

Duke might not be at the top of the college game today or even Monday night, no matter what happens over the next three days. But its coach is. This is, in many ways, Krzyzewski's finest hour.

From a technical standpoint alone, what he's done this season ranks as one of the best coaching jobs you can possibly do in today's game. This hasn't been a one-year deal. This started three years ago when Krzyzewski began coaching for this weekend alone. That he's arrived here with three seniors, two juniors, one sure-fire NBA player and a host of role-playing underclassmen is because he planned it that way.

The team he called "a work in progress" at midseason, is almost a finished product, a body of work in the Krzyzewski tradition of program building. That the nation is once again focused on him and his school is the best indicator we have that Duke is back. But watching it all from close up, we know the truth.

He's been here all along. Building. Reloading. Waiting.

"We've been pretty good since 1986," he reminded someone at the ACC tournament in Greensboro three weeks ago.

While those closest to the game don't doubt his program's standing or his own focus, he spent a few minutes this week deflecting inane questions about the distraction of coaching the U.S. team to a gold medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

"It's just so crazy, so dumb, to think that," he said.

It made him a better coach and made this a better team. Krzyzewski has run this year's team like the national program, running a yearlong tryout camp for the freshmen, transforming Brian Zoubek into a basketball player before our very eyes and molding it all around three gunslingers. Duke is the nation's best defensive team and a team impossible to defend for an entire game.

Krzyzewski was asked late in the year how good he thought this team was, and he gave an honest assessment.

"I think we're a very good basketball team," Krzyzewski said. "I don't think we're a great team. I know we're not a great team. But we do have pretty good heart."

At the time he was attempting the impossible, a late-season alteration of the offense. His decision to get more shots for his sure-fire NBA player, Kyle Singler, was met with derision by those who saw Duke as nothing but a jump-shooting team with no heart. Singler was and is the heart, and in the tradition of Johnny Dawkins, Christian Laettner, Grant Hill, Chris Carrawell, Trajan Langdon, Shane Battier, Jason Williams and J.J. Redick, the coach built the team around the beating heart.

The half-court motion offense changed Duke overnight from a team struggling to find its identity to a remarkable thing. The defensive-minded Blue Devils became a half-court team on both ends of the floor, a team molded to the style of an NBA playoff team.

"I'm trying to coach this team like I did with my teams in the '80s," he said.

Those teams were all about defense. Those teams were about one transcendent player who Krzyzewski wanted handling the ball at the end. Those teams won or lost with the star taking the shot. This team has Singler, but it also has two more shooters who can take that shot and a defense that can turn games late as Duke has continued to do down the stretch this year.

If the Olympics experience had anything to do with that, it's that Krzyzewski has started to treat his players more like he did the professionals two summers ago, as odd as that may sound. And he learned he had a new role.

"The Olympics helped me immensely in becoming a better coach at this age," he said. "I'm in my early 60s, and I got a chance to learn more about the game, handle the responsibility of being the United States head coach, whatever that means, publicly, press-wise, as an ambassador. You have to learn from that.

"When you're around professionals you learn from being with them on how they handle things. How they prepare. How they handle the pick-and-roll. How they handle a tough question. How they do all those things. All that helped me a lot."

His teams have always had a lot of freedom. But now they know why. It's because they have the best coach in America, at the top of his game, granting them that freedom. Duke is back in the Final Four, and there's a certain inevitability to that. It only seems odd when Duke isn't.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com