I’m still addicted to Duke women’s basketball, and I’m not quite ready to give up the ghost on that yet.

It has been almost two and a half years since I left Durham, North Carolina, for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I spent four years teaching cultural anthropology and African-American studies at Duke (2002-2006). During that stint, I occupied just about all of my spare time rabidly cheering for the Duke women’s basketball team, the Duke Blue Devils. This included season tickets at Cameron Indoor Stadium and even a few trips to check out the team on the road.

I’m a native New Yorker, and as a sports fan part of what that means is that I was raised to be a serious anti-Dukie. And I definitely didn’t watch women’s basketball at all before I moved to North Carolina. But when I first got to Duke, I wanted to check out some games in the school’s historic basketball facility, Cameron Indoor (even though I was all set to adamantly root for any school Duke played against). Cameron is a small arena, and men’s basketball tickets are as precious as platinum on campus. But you can still land seats to the women’s games.

The first person I saw play was Alana Beard, the team’s All-American. She had already helped take them to a Final Four the year before I got there, but that wasn’t the thing that got me hooked. It was watching her singular exceptionalism with the basketball. No matter what team they played, Beard was always the best player on the floor—and by far. The basketball seemed like a prosthetic extension of her hands. She worked with it effortlessly, like wielding it had truly become second-nature to her, as easy and automatic as breathing, blinking. She was poetry in tube socks.

She also absolutely broke my heart each of her final two years in Durham. The team was always good enough to win the national championship (in my opinion), but they kept finding ways to lose it anyway—and usually quite dramatically: two missed free throws with no time left in regulation, a just-short jump shot that would have meant the difference, an opponent’s three-point dagger only an inch above a Duke defender’s outstretched hand during overtime in the national championship game. (Just thinking about that last one makes my eyes want to water.)

After Beard graduated, then-coach Gail Goestenkors (now at the University of Texas) didn’t allow her team to slip an inch. They were still dominant, even if perennial powerhouses like Tennessee and Connecticut always seemed to outlast them down the stretch.

As I continued to teach courses at Duke, some of the new recruits ended up taking my classes, which only gave me newfangled reasons to root for them (especially because they were often some of the most committed students in my classes). Given how much Division 1 schools ask of their athletes, the kids end up pulling off a kind of Herculean double-duty, full-time students and full-time athletes. And it is almost impossible to do both things rigorously and consistently over four years. Something often has to give. And after Title IX (federal legislation requiring schools to provide its female athletes with the same caliber of resources that their male counterparts receive), expectations were raised even higher for women’s collegiate sports.

My first year at Penn found me continuing to follow the Blue Devils. I watched all the Women’s games that I could catch on ESPN, and I even checked out an away game at Rutgers (the same team that would end their bid for a national championship that same year). But I still had several students from my classes who were on the team then. Now, two years later, only one player remains who has spent any time in one of my classes, Chante Black.

The team has some great new players (and a couple of fantastic veterans), but I didn’t teach them anthropology. I wasn’t able to watch them negotiate a first semester at college. So, my investment seems less substantive now, more mediated, farther removed.

I can still get myself worked up about them, made crazy by bad officiating or sloppy ball handling. Just yesterday, I watched Duke try their best to lose a game to a highly skilled Stanford squad. Duke did get the win, helped by a questionable call in the final seconds, and I was just glad to see that they could hold their own against a legitimate top-5 team.

Duke’s new coach, Joanne McCallie (formerly head-coach at Michigan State), is still trying to figure out what Duke women’s basketball is going to be in the post-Goestenkors era. (I was so disappointed when Coach G. left. It felt like a betrayal. Even though we’d never met, I took it personally. And the insult to injury is that she has already gotten Texas back to top-10 status, ranked higher than the Blue Devils, and in just two seasons. Ugh!)

But I’m still going to watch the Duke women this year—and drive myself batty in anxious anticipation of every single possession. But this might be my last season doing it: Chante Black’s last season—hopefully, finally, Duke Women’s Basketball’s national championship season!

That’s the dream. But it is hard to keep dreaming of Cameron from way up here in Philadelphia, especially when Penn’s storied Palestra has its own basketball dreamscape that’s just now starting to weave itself around me.

Photo: Duke’s Chante Black takes a shot over Stanford’s Jayne Appel, DWHoops.com