There will come a time after seniors L.D. Williams, Ish Smith, Chas McFarland and David Weaver graduate from Wake Forest that they will be watching a televised ACC basketball game in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
To say they beat Duke at Duke might be worth mentioning.
"I'm going to tell everybody I know," Williams said. "To get a win in there, especially in conference -- congratulations to Florida State, Maryland and Carolina, they all went in there and got wins.
"You cherish those."
Four ACC teams have knocked off Duke at Duke during Williams' college career, with FSU, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia Tech all winning in Cameron Indoor Stadium in 2006-07, his freshman season. But since, no team from any conference has won a game there other than the Tar Heels, who have won four straight in Cameron.
The Deacons, meanwhile, have lost 11 straight at Duke -- dating to Tim Duncan's senior season of 1996-97 -- going into today's game, scheduled for 8 p.m. Williams, Smith, McFarland and Weaver (who redshirted in 2005-06, and thus didn't play) are 2-2 in their careers against Duke, but they're 0-2 in Durham.
Wake Forest didn't play at Duke during the 2007-08 season.
But there will be a coach in the traveling party who knows what it's like to win at Duke. Rusty LaRue, a first-year assistant with the Deacons, experienced four straight victories in Cameron Indoor Stadium stretching through the 1995-96 season during the Deacons' streak of nine straight victories over the Blue Devils.
"It's cool having Coach LaRue here because he never lost there," Williams said. "Nobody, except him, has ever won there."
"But we know what it takes to win there."
What it will take, Smith said, is discipline, execution, exertion and perhaps most of all, confidence. The Blue Devils are ranked No. 8 at 14-2 overall and 2-1 in the ACC. Wake Forest improved to 12-3 and 2-1 with Tuesday's home victory over Maryland.
"It's a great atmosphere and I'm excited to go there and play," Smith said. "It's just another ACC road game, and you've got to get it to be the elite team we want to be.
"That's the mindset we're going to go in there with."
The game may be decided on the perimeter, where Coach Mike Krzyzewski's Blue Devils are one of the ACC's best 3-point shooting teams and the Deacons lead the conference with a 3-point percentage defense of .259. Duke is second (to Virginia) with a 3-point percentage of .395 and second (to Miami) with 8 3-point attempts made a game.
From behind the arc, Jon Scheyer is shooting 40 percent, Nolan Smith is shooting 50 percent, Andre Dawkins is shooting 42 percent and Kyle Singler, despite his recent struggles, is shooting 34 percent.
Scheyer has flourished since his move to point guard last February. Besides averaging 19.6 points a game, he also has 97 assists compared to 21 turnovers.
"They have an incredibly high skill set," Coach Dino Gaudio of Wake Forest said. "The eight guys that Mike is playing are really skilled basketball players.
"And they play incredibly hard."
The Deacons have two assets that should serve them in good stead in the crazy confines of Cameron, ample experience and a point guard, in Smith, who can break down his defender and get to the basket.
The five players who started Wake Forest's last game against Maryland have played 374 games of college basketball among them.
"Although these kids haven't tasted victory there yet, this will be their third time down there," Gaudio said. "So we have some experience. We've been in that very difficult environment before."
dcollins@wsjournal.com.
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