"Maturity and Disappointment."
Sounds like the name of a major motion picture or one of those British melodramas people watch on Sunday nights on PBS, doesn't it?
Instead, those were the words used often Thursday night by Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski and Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg.
Duke won the men's ACC basketball game 75-60, so you probably can guess which coach likes his team's maturity and which coach found disappointment to be the theme for the evening.
Both coaches had valid points.
It was painful for Greenberg to talk about his team's lack of physical and mental toughness, but it's not the first time this season he has done so.
The post-game conversations were predictable. They expose the stark difference that can exist between and among teams in a league even as highly rated as the ACC.
Greenberg is frustrated with the breakdowns that come from young players in their first ACC rodeo.
But Duke's starting lineup and bench is almost as young as Virginia Tech's. The difference is that when Duke loses significant players to graduation or professional basketball, the Blue Devils reload.
When Virginia Tech loses players to graduation or pro ball, the Hokies have to rebuild. Often, that process can take several years.
Duke, with such players as Austin Rivers, Tyler Thornton, Quinn Cooke and Josh Hairston, is trying to reach its peak for the NCAA tournament.
Virginia Tech, with such players as Dorian Finney-Smith, Marquis Rankin, Jarell Eddie and Robert Brown, simply is trying to find a way to stay with good teams and win games.
"I'm disappointed with how we deal with adversity," Greenberg said. "When they (the Blue Devils) bowed their necks, we melted.
"It disappoints me because, and this sounds stupid, I think we're a good team, I didn't say a great team. And they're (the Blue Devils) not a great team. They're a very good team. And I didn't like how we dealt with those mini-setbacks. That's not who we've been for eight years."
It's who the Hokies are now, though, and it frustrates Greenberg greatly.
"That's something we've got to continue to work on," he said.
Krzyzewski wasn't proud just of what his team did on the court Thursday night. He's pleased with a decision the players made that is atypical of college athletes, college students and professional athletes.
For the remainder of the season, the Blue Devils' players are abstaining from sending tweets to the rest of the world.
"Instead of a Twitter family or whatever, they thought it was better to concentrate on our family," Krzyzewski said. "It's for the next couple of months. Then they'll have a lot to tweet about afterward, and hopefully it will be good things.
"I think that's a mature (there's that word again) decision on their part. You have to focus on what you are doing as a group. You have to talk to one another. There has to be interaction. Our guys are trying to do that, and I'm proud of them. And we're trying to help them do that so we become even closer as a team."
Meanwhile, Greenberg is just trying to develop a competitive team.
Before the season ends, he's like to be on the "maturity" side of the post-game conversation. The problem, though, is he knows how difficult that will be to achieve.
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