Fame and Fortune are right around the corner for young Cooper Flagg. The life he imagined from the time he was a boy with a ball and a dream will soon be waiting for him. The career he envisioned playing against LeBron James and Steph Curry is right at his fingertips.
But when you are an 18-year-old freshman and you love your college basketball brothers, when you are not ready for your one and only college basketball season proudly wearing that DUKE across your chest to end, you live for today, when the thrill of victory, the biggest victory of your college basketball life, belongs to you, and the agony of defeat belongs to Alabama.
Cooper Flagg, an 85-65 winner, burned to be cutting down the nets at the end of the East Region Elite Eight at Prudential Center, and he burns now to be cutting down the nets as a national champion with his Duke brothers inside the Alamodome, burns now to take Jon Scheyer to his first Final Four and national championship as Coach K’s successor, burns now to deliver to the school its first national championship in a decade, still gets to dream about soaking in his One Shining Moment.
He has experienced plenty of shining moments in his remarkable freshman year, but not the One that would mean the most to him and go down in Duke lore. Not yet, anyway.
