GREENVILLE, SC — Tom Izzo straightened out his quarter-zip, folded his arms, stared into the crowd and exhaled. It was right before tipoff, a few minutes past 5:15 pm For the next 40 minutes, he would find himself deadlocked in a high-stakes, narrative-filled coaching battle, against a team more talented than his, with a chance to play spoiler. The sweet spot.

These opportunities, on a stage like this, are the ones Izzo lives for. This was the type of matchup basketball fans and sports fans at-large tune in to watch unfold, largely because of the two faces of these programs. Duke versus Michigan State. Izzo versus Mike Krzyzewski, one final time. A storyline only topped by the game that transpired.

It just wasn’t the result Izzo or his Michigan State team were looking for.

“He’s got another game to play, and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” Izzo said of Krzyzewski. “(I’ll) probably be beating myself up for a week because not many times do you get an opportunity to be right there in the threshold of something special, and it slipped away.”

That’s how Izzo will remember this one — Michigan State’s 85-76 loss to Duke and Coach K in the second round. As he answered questions in his postgame news conference, Izzo said his team didn’t do what it needed to in order to pull out a win like this. When he says that, he’s speaking from experience. There’s a good chance he’ll look back at this, perhaps on the flight home, and think about what went wrong. Because for all its wars, this team was right there.

If he were to win this game, with this team, against that coach … well, you can only imagine how satisfying that would’ve been for Izzo. Maybe that’s why he won’t soon forget this one. Because there was a point where it looked like it was meant to be.

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