The Journey recaps Kentucky's upset win vs. Duke
It's the moment you've all been waiting for, Big Blue Nation. With every big-time victory for Kentucky basketball comes The Journey, the UK Sports Video series that takes you behind the scenes in award-winning fashion. This time, it's to recap the Wildcats' trip to Atlanta for the Champions Classic where they took down the Duke Blue Devils — also in award-winning fashion, conveniently enough.
You get the build-up and the media narratives entering the matchup, highlighted by Cooper Flagg and Jon Scheyer's young talent taking on Mark Pope's experience with one of the oldest teams in college basketball.
"The bigger the fight, the better the feeling," Pope told the Wildcats in the locker room leading up to the opening tip. "The more physically engaged we are, the better the feeling. The more we hit and fight and hold and scratch and claw, the better the feeling, right? That's just how it is. The more adversity we can take in and overcome because we stay on our toes the whole time, the better the feeling when we walk back into this locker room."
Then we get the first half and those ups and downs, Pope telling the team in the huddle they're in a good spot while Mark Fox yells, 'We've got more guys than they've got. Keep coming.' Then Alvin Brooks III reminds the group to 'use our championship chest and make them take contested jump shots' after the Blue Devils managed to score 12 of their first 19 points in the paint.
We get the slippage to close out the first half, leading to a locker room talk with Pope sharing his adjustments coming out of the break: transition defense and ball screen defense.
"That is this game right now," he said. "It's the whole game. Everybody is jealous of where you are now, nobody is jealous of how you got there. ... Our hearts have to be doubled up right now, we have to go earn it. Let's make people jealous of where we're going. We're built different."
Kentucky starts chipping away coming out of halftime, slowly but surely cutting into Duke's lead to put itself in striking distance. Down six, Pope tells his group at the first media timeout that the next four minutes will be where the Cats make their move to take over the momentum.
"Here's the thing about us, okay? You know all of the emotion we had in the first four minutes of this half? We're going to have it in the next four minutes, no matter what happens, right? It's who we are," he said. "All the way through this game, we are bringing it. What do we do with frustration? We spit it out. We're spitting it out and turning it into fight."
The rest? Well, you just need to see if for yourself. An all-time performance for Kentucky is done justice, to put it simply.
Watch the best 15 minutes of your weekend below:
And now you can watch it on replay the rest of the night.
This one is never going to get old.
