They will board the bus, and return to the hotel, and party like crazy in a special banquet room done up all nice by Coach K's wife. They will eat sandwiches and drink soda (hey, wait, that's not soda) and act giddy with each other, and hug their families and swap nudges with a few special guests (Will Avery, Chris Carrawell). They will, of course, not sleep.

At 6 a.m., Mike Dunleavy will do the Today show and Jason Williams will do Good Morning America. At 10 a.m. they will hop the charter plane back to Durham, and four hours later they will land, and later that day they will all go to Cameron Indoor Stadium (assuming it hasn't burned down) and they will bask in the Crazies-ness one more time.

Later this month there will be the White House, and the Tonight Show, and lots of other fun things like that. In six months, they will start another season.

Are we missing anything?

Oh, yes, that's right: They will, between now and then, all say goodbye to Shane Battier. Can you imagine what that will feel like? For Coach K? For Coach K's wife? For Mike Dunleavy. For Jason Williams? Someone in the media room joked Sunday that it seemed like Duke recruited Shane Battier in 1937, and Coach K was amused by the notion. Then he said he had no idea what it would be like to have Shane move on, that this wasn't the time to tackle those emotions yet. Now, the title won, it is that time, and you just know the way Coach K talks about Shane, calling him his "star pupil," his favorite player to coach, that this will be harder than watching Elton Brand or Bobby Hurley or Christian Laettner walk away.

Several hours after the Blue Devils' win over Maryland on Saturday, Dunleavy and Casey Sanders sat together in their hotel room, and for five sad minutes, they talked about what the Devils would do without Shane Battier next year, about who would fill his void as scorer, rebounder, leader, poster boy, quote machine, dignitary, jokester. The season wasn't over, and already they wondered. And already they knew. Said Sanders tonight, recalling what he and Dunleavy thought, sitting there in their hotel room: "Man, we're gonna miss Shane."

Scott Burton is covering the Final Four for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail scott.burton@espnmag.com.