David HaleMar 14, 2026, 11:15 PM ET

CloseCollege football reporter.Joined ESPN in 2012.Graduate of the University of Delaware.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Virginia’s Dallin Hall understands how Cameron Boozer must’ve been feeling Saturday. Hall spent the summer trying to work the paint against teammate Ugo Onyenso, the Cavaliers’ 7-foot, shot-blocking center.

“It’s frustrating,” Hall said. “[Boozer] is a really great player, and he made some great plays down the stretch, but you could tell Ugo was frustrating him.”

Thing is, for all of Onyenso relentless disruption near the rim, the frustration roiling inside Boozer’s head never showed on the court. And despite a 3-of-17 performance from the field, he still sparked Duke with eight rebounds, eight assists and a pair of free throws with 3 seconds remaining to ice the Blue Devils’ 74-70 win over Virginia.

“I did get frustrated,” said Boozer, who still finished with 11 points in Duke’s 74-70 victory. “But I just had to keep attacking and find ways to win.”

It helped to have a brother on the court, too, who was more than capable of picking up the slack. Cayden Boozer poured in 12 points in the game’s first 11 minutes to spark Duke early, and he finished with 16 points and pulled down the Blue Devils’ 20th offensive rebound of the game to help seal the win.

If Virginia had done its job against one Boozer brother, it utterly whiffed on the other.

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“In the beginning of the game, they weren’t guarding me, and I kept scoring,” Cayden Boozer said. “Once I get confident, I feel like no one can really stop me.”

That Cayden Boozer proved Saturday’s hero was a fitting culmination to Duke’s ACC tournament championship run.

The Blue Devils entered play this week missing two key contributors in guard Caleb Foster and center Patrick Ngongba II, and after a shaky performance against Florida State on Thursday in which Cayden Boozer stumbled through a miserable first half, it seemed the No. 1 team in the country suddenly had some real questions looming over it ahead of the NCAA tournament.

Three days later, Duke is a champion, the presumptive top seed for the tournament, and those questions have vanished amid a flurry of productive minutes from the background players — even when superstar Cameron Boozer was far from his best.

For much of this season, Cameron had been Duke’s Superman — a strong candidate to win national player of the year honors. But on Saturday, Onyenso was his kryptonite.

Onyenso finished with nine blocks in the game — more than half coming against Boozer — and ended his three-game tournament run with 21 total blocks, demolishing Tim Duncan’s previous ACC tournament record of 14.

“Blocking shots is what I do,” Onyenso said. “I’m really good at it — even against the top players.”

Onyenso grinned as Hall lamented the struggles of trying to get to the rim with the big man nearby, but he was quick to downplay any pain he might’ve inflicted upon Boozer.

“He didn’t show it,” Onyenso said. “Most players, that would’ve been the reason they lost the game — being frustrated like that, not getting their shots. But he made plays for them.”

That’s part of the secret sauce of this Duke team, head coach Jon Scheyer said. He’s built a roster of guys who are long on grit, even if the shots aren’t falling.

“He finished with 13 [points], eight [rebounds] and eight [points],” Scheyer said. “That’s a bad night for him. We’re very spoiled.”

Indeed, Duke — the school — is awash in riches. With Saturday’s win, Duke secured an ACC trifecta, winning the conference title in football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. That’s something that had never been done in ACC history. According to ESPN Insights, the last school to win a major conference championship game in all three sports in the same academic year was Ohio State in 2009-2010 (though Oregon came close in 2020, winning the Pac-12’s football and women’s basketball title and the regular-season championship in men’s hoops before the tournament was canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic).

And yet, this hardly feels like a crowning moment for these Blue Devils. Scheyer has won the ACC’s tournament in three of the last four years, but his NCAA tournament title hopes have been dashed each time.

Saturday’s win doesn’t assure a different outcome in 2026, but the performance amid so many potential pitfalls did offer a reminder that Duke is more than its best player, and it’s capable of finding ways to win even when the blueprint is being drawn up on the fly.

“The identity we’ve created,” Scheyer said, “the loose balls, the rebounds, the will to get it has to go up as you go on in March.”