Too Good to Be Blue?

This time, the gloves came off. So too, did the jacket.

Then Mike Krzyzewski's stoic demeanor, that steel-melting stare that's equal parts Rodin and Rambo, wound up discarded behind the bench like an empty Gatorade cup.

And by the time Duke's 101-91 track meet of a victory over Wake Forest finished with an emotional bell lap, the whole Blue Devil team tossed away a lot of frustration, too.

"Tonight was a huge game for us," Krzyzewski said. "It was as big a game as we've had in three years. ... So whatever you can do ethically, legally and physically, you got to try to do."

And the Blue Devils did plenty.

For one night, at least, they shed the image of a team softer than a lullaby and with a psyche more fragile than your grandmother's china. They ended a stretch of offensive sputtering so woeful that you might've assumed they'd picked up the Detroit Lions playbook by accident. They took the best shot of a top-10 team and stood toe-to-toe asking for another round.

And on Oscar night, they received a performance from their head coach that would've been sure to earn a nomination if only he hadn't missed the deadline.

"The last couple days leading up to the game, you could tell his intensity level had risen a little bit," said Gerald Henderson, Duke's leading scorer with 35. "We want to win this league and we're still fighting for first place. His intensity and his passion is something that leads us and we just followed his lead."

But was it a true reemergence as a contender or just the most statue-worthy acting job the sports world has seen since Mickey Rourke sliced open his forehead?

Put us down for a solid, unequivocal maybe. On both counts.

Sure, the Blue Devils won gutsy. Credit Krzyzewski for having a set the size of gold medals to bench both of his point guards and put the ball in the hands of shooting guard Jon Scheyer; credit him for turning junior center Brian Zoubek's minutes over to freshman Miles Plumlee and for entrusting more than 30 minutes a game and a starting spot to slashing wing Elliot Williams, all during a time of the year where experimentation usually rides the pine.

And then there's the small matter of bringing the Blue Devils further back to their motion offense roots, switching from a man-to-man defense to a 1-2-2 zone to curtail Wake Forest's penetration in the second half, and keeping the tempo dialed up high enough to force Wake Forest's towering front court to the sidelines.

Heck, after watching him tweak Duke from sputtering to splattering Wake all over the court, you'd be forgiven for assuming Krzyzewski might be able to solve this whole economic mess by moving around a few decimal points.

But has he truly found a new way to power his Blue Devils or just caught lightning in a bottle?

After all, Wake Forest now hasn't won a game in Cameron since 1997, when Tim Duncan roamed the ACC. Or, to put it another way, the last time the Deacons were victorious in Durham, your wife probably flipped over to Ally McBeal when the game ended. The last time this Deacon team won a road game this year (beating Clemson in January), you were still laughing at the thought of Arizona in the Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, the last time Duke got a pair of performances like it did from Henderson and Scheyer, Krzyzewski was still answering to Sir at West Point. Henderson scored 35 points -- most an array of SportsCenter-ready highlights -- and Scheyer added 30, both career highs and the first 30-30 teammate effort since 1980.

After the game, Henderson joked that he hadn't hit a 3-pointer off the dribble in a game or in practice in weeks. But he drilled a huge win against Wake Forest to give Duke a 93-82 lead in what felt like the moment the credits started to roll.

"I shot a pretty good percentage today," Henderson said. "I don't want to say it was lucky, but I made a lot of my shots."



But as impressive as their victory was, can the new-look Blue Devils put up another game like that? Their 138.2 offensive efficiency rating is by far the best of the season and the teams' best in meaningful games since No. 1 Duke beat No. 2 Texas in December 2005, behind 41 points from J.J. Redick. (Duke also topped 138.2 against North Carolina Central last year and UNC Greensboro in 2006, both decidedly lesser competition).

And can Duke's experiment with Scheyer at the point stand a top-notch perimeter defense, one like Clemson, a team that obliterated the Blue Devil guard play?

In two games as the team's point guard, Scheyer has committed just a single turnover while handing out four assists and averaging 24 points. But neither Wake Forest nor St. John's are exactly the global warming of pressure defenses. The Deacons are typically an excellent defensive squad, but their packline system is predicated on turning lanes to the basket into cul-de-sacs, not creating turnovers on the perimeter. And Krzyzewski's victory in the tempo war rendered much of the Deacons' length idle.

St. John's, the new lineup's first victim, is comfortably lodged in the basement of the Big East.

But, as it turns out, Krzyzewski wasn't the only man in Cameron who thought Scheyer was a tailor fit for the position.

"[Scheyer] is good," said Wake Forest coach Dino Gaudio, whose team held North Carolina point guard Ty Lawson to nine points in their Deacons' January win. "We put L.D. [Williams] on him, so whether [Scheyer] played the one or the two, we still put Williams on him."

"L.D.," he added, "is a really good defender."

And Scheyer scored 30.

We'll wait while you connect those dots.

Of course, with Duke, there's always defense, even when the offense is flirting with a BALCO-ish number of 101 points.

Usually, anyway.

While Duke's offense has found its groove, its defense continues to slump. Of the last four teams Duke played, each has shot at least 54 percent from the floor. The Deacons, meanwhile, connected on just about everything the tossed at the rim. A full 61 percent of their shots dropped through the net, with 50 of the team's 91 points coming from star Jeff Teague, Williams and Ish Smith, three guards who couldn't have had an easier time getting in the lane if it had been marked with its own exit ramp. They corralled more than half of their own misses and turned the ball over just four times in the final 24 minutes after surrendering 16 turnovers in the first 14 minutes, three on inbound steals by Elliot Williams within 39 seconds of each other.

"If someone had said we were going to score 91 points and lose," Gaudio said, "I think I would have called them a liar."

But should we call Duke a true national title contender in the way a victory like this suggests, or, is it like Miami's 27-point whipping of this same Deacon team, more mirage than fact? Scheyer's move to the point seems to have jump-started the offense, while Elliot Williams' move insertion to starting lineup gives Duke another of the classic slashing wings that have defined the program under Krzyzewski while opening up the offense for Henderson.

And then there's Krzyzewski, who finally seems to be getting through to this team one way or another.

"Instead of saying we had to win it, I told them we're going to win it," Krzyzewski said of how he handled the pressure of this must-win ACC tilt. "I think sometimes the anticipation of doing something should help more than the expectation of having to do it. It's a little like what we did with the Olympic team. We're going to win, not that we have to win. It's a subtle thing, but it's an important thing."

Of course, what it led to was as subtle as a four-car pileup. A glass jaw turned granite, a struggling offense turned spectacular.

And maybe, just maybe, a contender reborn.

If they can figure out how to keep this up. If the gloves come off a few more times. If this wasn't just another great acting job.