Mike Krzyzewski stood at midcourt, his hands clasped behind his back, the day’s practice plan clutched in his left. He didn’t say much, sharing an occasional reminder to “be shot ready” that Trevor Keels immediately parroted. In the meantime, Jon Scheyer, the practice plan folded up lengthwise and tucked into the waistband of his sweatpants, bounced from under the hoop and out to the wing. He threw his hands up in the face of the spot-up shooter before doubling back to the middle of the paint, hiking up his pants to get in a defensive stance, and then dashing out in front of the next shooter on the opposite corner. When Jeremy Roach zinged him for getting out a little late, Scheyer didn’t miss a beat. “Didn’t need to be there on that one,’’ he said, as Roach’s shot clanked off the front of the rim.

So nothing has changed just yet. Scheyer is still the fun young assistant, the one who jumps into the drills and tosses a little trash talk at his players, and Krzyzewski is very much in charge. But the baton is at least hovering, somewhere between the third leg and the final transfer of the relay. Krzyzewski’s attachment is by the slivers of his fingertips. At best he has 160 minutes of basketball competition left in his career.

By necessity, then, the circus has to follow him wherever he goes, a cavalcade that feels like both respectful witness to history and ambulance chasers. On the eve of Duke’s Sweet 16 game against Texas Tech, the seats for the Blue Devils’ allotted news conference times were slightly more full, and 10 TV cameras turned their lenses toward Krzyzewski during Duke’s 15 minutes of open practice. “I feel for my guys,’’ Krzyzewski says. “They’ve had pressure put on them that we’re not putting on them. I tell them all the time, ‘we’re playing for us, for you,’ but then it just works out. No one … it’s not a sinister plan against us or anything but it just happens that way.’’

Krzyzewski says he only made his intention public because he believed to decide his future and not tell anyone would be disingenuous. “I didn’t want to recruit a kid in an unethical manner, where you’re telling a kid that he might play for you, and then you’re going to pull the plug,’’ he says. But as soon as he declared this his last season, it became the Year of Coach K on the college basketball calendar. Whether he asked for it or created it was immaterial. In his corner of the world, the one he could control, it was not about him. Everywhere else, it was. Presentations, proclamations and celebrations would follow him, all tailor-made for ESPN, the worldwide leader in overkill. “All season we’ve been dealing with it,’’ freshman Paolo Banchero says. “It’s Coach’s last something every game.’’

Mixed in those lasts is the immense burden of extending the last game for as long as possible, a burden only the players could carry. Krzyzewski is a West Point graduate, a man taught via the rigors of academy training how to compartmentalize life and cordon off emotions. “That’s your order. That’s your mission,’’ he says. “It’s not about the battle you won. It’s about the battle you are going to fight. Then when it’s over, there’s another battle. No rearview mirror in your car.’’ He’s also been coaching for 42 years and has spent nearly all of them under the shine of a spotlight.