Bonfire heats up Duke campus as students celebrate

It was a bonfire befitting a national champion -- a roaring conflagration fed by a series of wooden benches and nine years of basketball frustration.

"This is incredible," said junior Luke Li, one of the thousands of Duke students who made it to the bonfire on the residential quad after Duke beat Butler, 61-59 in a tight game for the NCAA national championship Monday night.

"This is a dream come true, everything I've ever wanted for Duke basketball," Li said.
At the end of the game, students rushed from Cameron Indoor Stadium, dorms, apartments and everywhere else they were watching the championship to the residential quad where Duke authorities had obtained a permit for the bonfire. Duke only got the permit for the national championship, the first time it had won the title since 2001.
The bonfire, in a designated spot in the middle of the quad, reached high into the warm spring night, sending sparks up near the overhanging trees.
The students were pumped from the beginning -- from before the beginning -- and when the final seconds ticked off the clock 600 miles away in Indianapolis, the 4,500 students in Cameron Indoor Stadium on Monday night erupted one last time.
Their school -- Duke University -- was the national champion, defeating Butler 61-59 in the title game."This is the greatest, the absolute greatest," shouted Emily Chen, a Duke student. "It is so good, I think we're all going to party all night."
The partying began way before the game did.
Midafternoon, hours before tip-off, the students were pumped.
The crowd started gathering in Cameron a little after 8 p.m., students running to the seats that are usually jammed for all Duke home games. The scoreboard, lowered from the ceiling of the arena, showed television shots of Butler's team arriving at the arena in Indianapolis -- loud boos -- and then, five minutes later, huge cheers for shots of Duke's arrival.
The students gathered in the center, away from the three banners that hang at Cameron's end -- for the national championships of 1991, 1992 and 2001. Those banners will soon be joined by a fourth.
Duke junior Victor Chou, en route to the stadium, was confident.
"I think we're going to do it tonight," said Chou, who, like almost everybody on campus, it appeared, was wearing a Duke T-shirt. "We've been waiting a long time for this and it's going to happen tonight."
Annie Jorgensen, a Duke sophomore, couldn't wait to get in to Cameron.
"Everybody is so pumped for this," Jorgensen said. "The whole campus is so excited."