GREENVILLE, S.C. — Joe Roach needs two phones. Probably more.
One for the texts, obviously, popping onto his iPhone screen with the fervor of a furious concert pianist. One for the FaceTimes, from cousins and family friends and damn near everyone in the entirety of Leesburg, Va. Managing all those messages, in the waning minutes of Duke’s second-round NCAA Tournament game, would be a full-time job in itself. But really, he needs a third more than either of the other two: for recording purposes. The better the camera, the closer the zoom, the better.
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Joe wants to record this all. He will record this all. Just look at him there, in his aisle seat six or so rows off the court inside Bon Secours Wellness Arena, directly behind Mike Krzyzewski on Duke’s bench. (His wife, Carole, has migrated to the middle of the aisle beside him, with more room for pacing and praying. Who can blame her?) They’re not hard to miss, in their dueling Duke jerseys — Joe in conventional blue, Carole sporting the Gothic script — with the same number centered in the back: 3.
Fitting, huh?
The number. The play. And it all comes back to one person: their son, Jeremy. For much of this season, and especially of late, he’s been a valuable cog in the Blue Devils’ backcourt backlog. Now? Well, he’s more than that. Much more. Because when Wendell Moore whipped a pass his way with 1:18 remaining in Sunday’s game against Michigan State, Duke desperately clinging to a one-point lead, it was Jeremy Roach who wound up in the moment — shot clock at seven, six, needing to summon something, anything, to keep this season alive — with only two options:
Meet the moment, or melt from it.
That simple. There is no middle ground, no gray area. You make the play, or you don’t. “I was wondering,” Krzyzewski said later, “if we were going to stay young.” And can you blame him? After amassing a nine-point lead early in the second half — and in the process, Duke looking every bit the dangerous, deadly, rolling ball of knives it can be — the whole damn thing came undone. Turnovers, forced shots, porous perimeter defense; Michigan State, makers of 15 3-pointers in their previous three games combined, suddenly turned into the Splash Brothers, draining 11 treys. With just over eight minutes to play, A.J. Griffin, Duke’s designated sharpshooter, went down with an ankle injury and couldn’t return. So, yeah, when Marcus Bingham Jr. made the second of two free-throws with five minutes to go, giving the Spartans a five-point edge? You better believe Coach K (and the rest of Duke’s crowd) started to sweat. If anyone affiliated with that hue of blue tells you otherwise? Pssshh, they’re lying.
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It was all too real, all too fast. The end of the season, this team, Krzyzewski’s career. Those threads are all woven so tightly together, there’s just no separating stitch from stitch. It was a subtle terror, simmering in the stadium, but a terror nonetheless.
And then Jeremy Roach, with one dribble and a perfect parabola, erased it all.
“That’s who he is,” Carole told The Athletic. “That’s who he’s been all along.”
“Since the fourth grade!” Joe interjects. “You can check the film on that.”
So, let’s. Only, start the cut-up at that 5:10 mark, when it all felt feeble and frail and on the fringe of falling apart. Yes, Roach put the punctuation mark on Duke’s eventual 85-76 win, sending the Blue Devils to Mike Krzyzewski’s 26th Sweet 16, but his teammates sure played their parts in even making that moment possible. Immediately after those Bingham foul shots, Paolo Banchero imposed his physicality with a layup to bring things back to three. A small dent, but one nonetheless. “We were like, man, we got four minutes. We can either lay down, or we can turn it up. That’s really all it was,” Banchero said. “Just fighting … having heart, and just trusting each other.” Next came a defensive stop, one of Mark Williams’ team-high eight rebounds, and a nifty layup inside to cut it back to one with 4:17 remaining. Breathe. For the next three minutes thereafter, the two teams traded punches and the lead. Banchero’s driving layup with 2:05 left, and his subsequent block on Joey Hauser, then set up the aforementioned moment. Banchero got blocked off at the elbow, tossed the ball back to Moore on the right side of the arc, and … well, let the actors describe the scene themselves.
“The clock was winding down. Normally in that situation we call green, which means we have to get a good shot up,” said Moore, Duke’s junior captain. “I was just looking at the matchups and thought Jeremy had a good matchup.”
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So he whirled it across the court, to a spot right in front of his 75-year-old coach, the one clinging to the final few games of his Hall of Fame career. Seven, six seconds on the slot clock … “The four-minute media (timeout), I was thinking to myself, if I get an open 3, I’m knocking it down,” Roach said from the dais, his hair sufficiently soaked from a postgame water bottle shower. “The shot clock was winding down, and I knew I had to make a play.” When he caught Moore’s pass, his wrist already cocked, it was only a matter of how quick he’d get off the shot. Five, four… One dribble, a step forward from the midcourt logo to the edge of the arc, and the rise-up.
Meet it, or melt from it, right?
Swish.
“Tears,” Carole said, “almost came out my eyes.”
“I’m just elated, man,” Joe adds, shaking his head, not wanting to wake from this dream. “It’s crazy. It’s surreal right now.”
From the 10,000-foot view, it doesn’t quite make sense. On a team with arguably five future first-round NBA Draft picks, Roach is the sixth guy you’d think could play hero. Except, Roach, after bouncing in and out of the starting lineup all season, has thoroughly stated his claim to being in the first five during the last month. “It’s like he put the chip back in from (his high school days at) PVI,” Joe said, hailing back to when Roach was a five-star recruit. “We plugged it back in, like, ‘Do you, baby. Just do you.’ He’s clearly gotten his confidence back, and that’s what it takes.”
Call it confidence, cajones, whatever you please. But since Duke traveled to Charlottesville, Va., on Feb. 23 — a short two-hour sprint due south of Roach’s hometown — he has been averaging 11.6 points and 1.6 assists per game while shooting 41.9 percent from 3. Twice, he has scored 15 points, his season-high. Heck, even before that, when Trevor Keels was still out nursing his ankle injury in late January, “Jeremy kind of carried us,” Krzyzewski said, crediting Roach’s consecutive nine-assist games. So when Duke rolled into South Carolina this week, Krzyzewski finally rewarded his sophomore guard by slotting him in with the starters. “(When) we started the week, we just said we need great ball pressure,” Krzyzewski said. “He can do that, and he did that today, but also to lead us.”
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You know what leaders do? They deliver amidst the drama.
Bobby Hurley against UNLV. Tyus Jones against Wisconsin.
And now, regardless of how the rest of Duke’s season turns out, Jeremy Roach against Michigan State.
“It will sound a little crazy to you,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said postgame, “but their two best players, in my mind, were Roach and Moore. I love Banchero, and Williams is hard to cover, but it was Roach and Moore that really took over.”
You know why he’d say Roach. As for Moore, well, scan the stat sheet and focus your gaze on his free-throw percentages: nine makes in 10 tries, four of which came after Roach’s 3. Roach provided the cushion, but Moore made sure there wasn’t another undoing over the last 60 seconds. “I didn’t see anything but me and the bucket,” Moore said of stepping to the stripe late. “That’s my routine. I really have to close my eyes just so I can lock in.” And he did.
This brings us back to Joe, Carole, and their son — Duke’s difference-maker Sunday. Thirteen of Roach’s eventual 15 points came in the second half, through an array of drives Krzyzewski said were, “some of the best drives I’ve seen as a Duke coach, really, especially in a pressure situation.” But none were bigger, or more memorable, than that 3. The one that cemented Roach’s spot in Blue Devils basketball lore, and sent this team to San Francisco for a meeting with No. 3 seed Texas Tech. So damn right Joe’s got his phone out, flipped sideways, panning throughout the stadium for every possible angle. He wants to remember it all, right down to the student section screaming a few rows back of him. And like any sports parent, no, he won’t relax until it’s finally final. “Oh my gosh,” Joe said the second the final buzzer blared. “Just let it get down to zero, and let’s be ahead.”
At that point, at long last, right behind the bench, it all boils over. Keels, Roach’s high school teammate who scored 12 points, comes over to embrace Joe and Carole. Mickie Krzyzewski, Coach K’s wife, is clapping toward the center of all her grandkids, who are simultaneously pushing SEND on booking their flights to the Bay Area. Roach won’t come back out until after his media obligations — uh, yeah, we’d like to talk to him, please — but that doesn’t stop Joe and Carole from celebrating with all the other parents.
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There’s just one last question, then, about Jeremy Roach and his family and what this moment — the moment — means to them all.
What’s Joe gonna do with his iPhone video?
“This is for right here,” he said, pounding the place on his chest right where the heart is. “That’s all I can tell you.”
(Top photo: Bob Donnan / USA Today)
