It’s the last day of March in 2001, and the Duke Blue Devils, led by faultless demigods Shane Battier ’01 and Jason Williams ’03, are hours from facing the hated Maryland Terrapins in the Final Four.

Our native tongue is beautiful and expressive, even if it’s not technically one of the world’s  Romance languages. English is, by category, a West Germanic language, and German itself is—at least to our ears—a guttural, aggressive array of dense consonant clusters and fricatives and glottal stops.