Tyus Jones and Jahlil Okafor have been inseparable since high school, and yet they insist this was a coincidence. The night before playing in the NCAA championship game, the Duke teammates both hit up YouTube to watch old clips of "One Shining Moment."
"You grow up watching the tournament. It's the best time of the year," said Jones. "... And at the end you see how happy the team is who won the whole thing. You just dream of being up on that stage."
On Monday night, the two freshmen joined the rest of their team on that stage, having rallied to beat Wisconsin 68-63 to win the 2015 national championship. There, they watched their own "One Shining Moment" montage play on the Lucas Oil Stadium video board. Okafor sang along to the words. Jones let out a big smile when his dagger 3-pointer from Monday's game came on the screen.
Few plans in life play out as perfectly as the two longtime friends' did this season. Which is why, as soon as the clock hit zero, Jones and Okafor collapsed onto the court together in a giant bear hug.
"It's like a book was waiting to be written, and it came to fruition," Jones' father, Rob, said as he watched the celebration with a streak of tears on his face.
But the two best friends wouldn't have done it without the help of some other friends – specifically, their fellow Duke freshmen. Down by as many as nine points in the second half to a veteran Wisconsin team, and with their best player, Okafor, sidelined with four fouls much of the last 10 minutes, the Blue Devils rallied thanks to clutch performances by heroes both familiar (Jones) and improbable (backup guard Grayson Allen).
Allen, like Jones and Okafor, is a freshman. So, too, is heralded teammate Justise Winslow. Together, they combined to score all 37 of Duke's second-half points – a remarkable accomplishment.
"For real?" asked Winslow when told of that stat in the locker room afterward. "I mean, we are freshmen, but Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] has never treated us like it. So for you to say that, it's an amazing accomplishment to be quote-unquote freshmen, but we never felt like freshmen the whole year.
"I'm just so happy that we got the job done and now we're national champions."
Duke's freshmen weren't the first to shine in a national championship game, but not even John Calipari's 2012 Kentucky title team relied so heavily on first-year players. And contrary to Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan's snide postgame remark that his program "won't do rent-a-player," one of the keys to the young Blue Devils' acclimation is the fact they cared so much about college basketball.
In the sport's one-and-done culture, many AAU standouts and McDonald's All-Americans view college as a short-term stopover on their way to the NBA. Okafor, Winslow and Jones may not be back for a second year, but they came to Duke specifically for a moment like Monday night's.
"We [Jones and Okafor] told each other in the ninth grade that we wanted to come to college and win a national championship," Jones recounted for the umpteenth time late Monday night.
If this was in fact Jones' lone season, he managed to pack a career's worth of highlights into it, from leading his team to victory at then-undefeated Virginia in late January to willing the Blue Devils to overtime in a win over rival North Carolina and scoring 24 points in a rematch victory in Chapel Hill.
On Monday night, he was the clear-cut Most Outstanding Player, scoring 19 of his 23 points in the second half. Just when Wisconsin had reclaimed the lead after Duke erased that nine-point deficit, Jones drilled a huge 3 to put the Blue Devils back up 59-58 with 4:06 left. When he hit another to go up 66-58 with 1:51 left he let out a huge roar on his way back down the court.
In between, Okafor, quiet for most of the night due to the foul trouble he endured trying to defend Wisconsin star Frank Kaminsky, asserted his dominance just when Duke needed it most. Immediately upon returning with 3:22 left after sitting for six minutes, the big man drew an and-one on Kaminsky, flustered him into a shot clock violation on the other end and hit a put-back to put the Blue Devils up 63-58.
But Duke would never have even gotten to that point without an unexpectedly huge night from Allen, the baby-faced shooting guard from Florida who came in averaging 8.9 minutes and 4.0 points per game. When the Badgers built their nine-point lead with 13:25 left, Allen zapped their momentum first with a 3, then a steal, then a layup and three free throws in just over a minute of action. When Duke finally reclaimed the lead, 56-54, with 5:32 left, it came on an Allen layup.
Until Jones passed him in the final minutes, Allen, with 16 points, was the Blue Devils' leading scorer. Like his more heralded teammates, Allen lived out his own dream.
"I saw [Duke] win in 2010, that national championship against Butler," he said. "I've dreamed about being in this moment since then. Never thought it would actually come true. But for it to happen, it's amazing."
It's old hat now for Krzyzewski, who celebrated his fifth national championship by posing for pictures on the court with his wife, three daughters and nine grandchildren. But every championship team's been a little different than the others. The 1991, '92 and 2001 teams were loaded with future pros. The 2010 team was not. The 2015 team will likely produce at least a trio, but it was by far his youngest and, with just eight scholarship players by the end, his thinnest.
They couldn't have done it if the freshmen weren't as mature and tight-knit as they were, starting with recruitments than began years before their arrival.
"They committed pretty early, so they got to know us deeper than a normal incoming freshman," said Krzyzewski. "Then they got to know the guys on the team. I think a statement that Quinn [Cook] has said a couple times this week is how humble the guys are. So here you have these four really good freshmen coming in, and they want to blend. They want to be led. They don't want it to be about them, although it's going to be a lot about them. They're good guys. They had that chemistry right away.
"It's been an incredible group. I've never had a group that has had this chemistry and the brotherhood that this group has had."
That's saying a lot coming from a guy who coached 39 teams before this one. And it may seem contradictory. How could a team, half of which has been there less than a year, even be considered a brotherhood?
Because for Okafor and Jones, that bond dates back to their formative years, forged over AAU tournaments and USA Basketball trips. At the core of that link was a shared dream. On Monday night, they achieved it.
And now, they'll always have their own One Shining Moment. They've already watched this year's.
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.
