The Tennessee game put to rest

NEW YORK – Watching film of your team’s last game in a season — almost always a loss — gets tricky and becomes individual decisions of each player.

The season ends, so there’s no need for it to fall into the same routine as every other game. Rehashing what worked and what mistakes were made in a film session gets moved down the priority list, and off it entirely, replaced by end-of-year meetings, conversations about pro pursuits, transfer options, so on and so forth.

Here’s where we land, 372 days later, Duke finally putting to rest the loss to Tennessee in last year’s second round of the NCAA tournament.

The Blue Devils played a similarly tough and physical James Madison team that won 32 games this season and demolished the Dukes 93-55 on Sunday night to reach the Sweet 16.

“You know, I think last night was the first time I watched the Tennessee game from last year,” sophomore forward Mark Mitchell said on Sunday night.

The irony there isn’t lost on Mitchell, who had started every game last season until a knee injury prevented him from playing against the Vols that day.

“I mean, I watched it because I didn’t play. Sitting there, watching it,” he said. “But that was the first time just seeing how they bullied us around, things like that.

“We definitely wanted to bring a different type of energy to this game and take the fight to them.”

Duke certainly checked those boxes.

The first of Jared McCain’s program record eight 3-pointers came 16 seconds into the game. It was a 15-5 lead after a few minutes, and the lead barely shrunk under 10 for the rest of the game.

It was the type of performance you knew this team was capable of, yet had every reason to be skeptical it would happen, based on the losses to UNC and N.C. State that were carried into the NCAA tournament.

Turns out, remembering a feeling felt so deeply a year later can be a hell of a motivating factor.

“I think just having that thought in our head and Coach (Jon) Scheyer bringing it up to us, how they punked us last year, was something we wanted to focus on this time around,” Mitchell said.

On the subject of different players watching film of the last game on their own schedule, sophomore guard Tyrese Proctor didn’t need a night-before refresher on Duke’s loss to Tennessee.

It’s film that he’s seen enough times.

“I didn’t even want to watch it again, I didn’t want to put that sort of picture in my mind,” Proctor said. “I’ve watched it many times, a lot of times. … I mean, that’s in the past now.”

There is some amount of closure that comes with this. Scheyer’s second season has felt linked to his first in several ways — how many key players returned without even gauging the NBA’s interest, the early and disappointing losses, marked improvement into the latter stages of ACC play.

Losing in the same round of the NCAA tournament, to another team that pushed around Duke, would’ve led to a lot of conversations of the program’s trajectory, Scheyer’s coaching acumen, the wasted potential of his “core group.”

Most of that lies in the hypothetical that, given how thorough Sunday’s game was, never encroached upon reality. Maybe it’s coming if Duke loses to Houston, or in the following game against N.C. State or Marquette. Another two wins in Dallas this weekend means realizing Final Four dreams in Arizona.

But again, that’s in the hypothetical realm. Now the Blue Devils push forward, leaving the past in Brooklyn.

“We’re obviously happy, but it’s not what we came back for,” Proctor said. “We came back to get to Phoenix and that’s our end mission. But like we said the other day, it’s one championship game at a time.”