SAN ANTONIO — The Cooper Flagg season ended with the ball in Cooper Flagg’s hands, one last shot to put Duke ahead in the final seconds. The shot every player thinks about in his driveway, even if there isn’t a commercial to document it.

This entire season had been building toward this, the entire NCAA Tournament, and Flagg turned in the lane, rose up. And missed. Front rim. The final, unrecoverable moment in two minutes of shocking collapse that doomed Duke’s season.

The basketball world will discuss what went wrong for years, how Duke led by 14 in the second half, by six points in the final minute, but made only one basket in the final 10 minutes to let Houston take away the chance to play for a national title the Blue Devils considered their own by right.

It was right there, there for the taking, Duke’s to claim. And it all slipped away so fast, so disastrously, so suddenly. Houston 70, Duke 67, and that’s all.

This grand experiment, taking a generational player and adding experience around him, starting three freshmen in the era of the fifth-year COVID senior, checked every box except the most important one.

“I keep going back,” coach Jon Scheyer said, “we’re up six with under a minute to go.”

But Duke didn’t score in the final 74 seconds as Houston squeezed the air out of the building. This is what Houston does, better than anyone. They attacked, harassed, harried, interfered.

The Blue Devils turned it over, missed the front end of a one-and-one, fouled on a rebound and suddenly found themselves trailing.

Scheyer called timeout with 17.2 seconds left to set up the play for Flagg, on the block, with a chance to maneuver for his own shot or kick it out to a teammate if Houston collapsed on him.

“Just be Coop,” Sion James said. “We trust him in that spot 100 out of 100 times.”

But in all four of Duke’s losses, the failure to make that shot — a burden carried, over the course of the season, not by Flagg alone — was the common thread.

In the loss to Kentucky, Duke didn’t score in the final 74 seconds. In the loss to Kansas, Duke didn’t score in the final 98 seconds. In the loss at Clemson, Duke didn’t score in the final 58 seconds.

And then this, the worst of them all, as painful a loss as there is in the history of this storied program. As painful as 1999, when the unquestioned best team in the country, on paper the best team in the entire analytics era, lost to Connecticut. As painful as 2004, in this building, when UConn went on a late 12-0 run to win by one. As painful as 2022, when Mike Krzyzewski’s career ended with another loss to North Carolina.

It all happened so quickly, it was impossible to comprehend in the moment. Krzyzewski, sitting in the Duke section among the parents, made a quick exit, but the friends and family behind Duke’s bench were still sitting in stunned silence minutes after the team had left the court.

“At the end of the day, you’re winning, you have the ball, and we came up empty twice,” Scheyer said. “You have to finish the deal.”

In the hush of the locker room, Tyrese Proctor sat deep in a locker, a towel over his head. Outside, Scheyer did a CBS interview, standing against a wall with Duke’s logo on it. When the lights clicked off and the camera turned away, he wiped his eyes, quickly.

There was a golf cart waiting to whisk Scheyer and Flagg and Kon Knueppel to a holding area, to await their news conference. Faintly, the Houston fans could be heard, still celebrating in the arena bowl. Knueppel was out there first, alone for a while, waiting, staring into nothing. Then Flagg emerged and climbed on the back, next to Duke general manager Rachel Baker.

His wild ride at Duke, a season so full of success that ended so precipitously, was over. The golf cart pulled away, taking Flagg into whatever his future holds now, as he looked backward into what is now the past.

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