SAN ANTONIO — Inside the searing silence of the Duke locker room, the echo of a door slamming shut intermittently rippled through. Every time a player or staff member ducked into the adjacent coaches locker room, the bang of the door reverberated like a siren in a still night.
There’s nothing to prepare a team for the emotional spiral that comes with squandering a six-point lead in the final 35 seconds. After Houston scored the game’s final nine points in 33 seconds to stun Duke 70-67 on Saturday night in the Final Four, a hush accompanied the Blue Devils’ attempts to process it.
Players wandered quietly to grab slices of pizza from the 10 boxes stacked high on a Powerade cooler. They stared down at their phones to avoid eye contact with the lingering media. One walk-on returned from the shower with tears in his eyes. Another wrote in a journal with a pencil.
They replayed how somehow…
