Duke survives late in gut-check win at Notre Dame

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — This was going to be like so many other Duke and Notre Dame games of recent memory: the heavyweight Blue Devils building a seemingly insurmountable lead, the upstart Irish shooting their way back into it, the battle of private schools that everyone loves to hate being flipped on its head once more — just four months after the football Blue Devils escaped here victorious, no less.

Here came Notre Dame, juiced by its student section and a run of 12 unanswered points, the offensive juggernaut looking to do what it had done in three of its previous five wins over Duke by overcoming a double-digit deficit.

Then came Grayson Allen pulling up from 3 and silencing the crowd, giving Duke a four-point lead that would only grow over the game’s final five minutes, by which point the Purcell Pavilion audience had thinned and the No. 17 Blue Devils had wrapped up an 84-74 win over the No. 20 Irish.

There are momentum-killers, and then there is a dagger coming from Allen, who had endured enough unprintable taunts from the Irish student section that the Grotto will undoubtedly be busier than normal later this week.

For Allen, who had a game-high 21 points, that is business as usual. And for Duke, that means consecutive road wins over a three-day span after a loss to NC State and an apparent gut-check from their sidelined coach, Mike Krzyzewski.

“It was fun to play that way,” Luke Kennard said after this win. “Especially an away game, to win two in a row away, and travel between each day in three days, it can be tough. But I’m so proud of the way that we stuck together. We showed a great amount of toughness tonight and that was really good.”

Duke players and coaches will take this victory and point to the end of the first half, when they held Notre Dame without a field goal over the final 8:41, the Irish misfiring on all 10 tries during that stretch. They will look at the 38-26 rebounding edge, the 36-20 margin in the paint and the 14 second-chance points they had to the Irish’s four. They will look at an Irish team that missed nine free throws in a 10-point game, they will look at their own 23-for-24 mark from the charity stripe and they will even wonder how the heck they held Irish sharpshooter Steve Vasturia to a 1-for-9 night.

But Duke did what it has failed to do so many other times over the past four seasons — it put away Notre Dame, which fell to 5-2 against Duke in ACC play — by growing up in the game’s final five-and-a-half minutes, starting with an Allen trey that begat a quick timeout to control the chaos, which was followed one possession later by another Allen jumper that grew the lead to six.

Consider: There were a ridiculous 48 total fouls called in this game. Even Irish coach Mike Brey, the self-described loosest-coach in America, received a technical early in the second half after consecutive calls went Duke’s way.

Duke was whistled for 18 fouls in the second half, and by the 4:23 mark senior forward Amile Jefferson had fouled out, and in came freshman Harry Giles. Less than 80 seconds later, Kennard, the team’s leading scorer, was gone, and in came another rookie in Frank Jackson.

Before that Allen 3-pointer that made it 66-62, Notre Dame had hit 15 of its 20 second-half shots. The Irish missed their next five, and seven of their last nine, as Duke pulled away behind a pair of buckets from two other freshmen, Jayson Tatum and Harry Giles.

“We really trust our depth,” Allen said. “We trust the guys that we have. Down the stretch of the game we’re playing without two of our starters and two of our really key guys, our [leading] scorer and one of our leaders. It was huge for Frank and Harry to come in and play the way that they did.”

And even bigger for Duke, which sent the Irish to a three-game slide by looking like the team everyone had been waiting to see for so long.