ESPN Women's Basketball

DURHAM, N.C. -- Let's flash back quickly. Remember that in the fall of 2006, Duke wasn't projected to be such a dominant force for the 2006-07 season. The Blue Devils were picked third in the ACC. They'd lost Monique Currie, Mistie Williams and Jess Foley off the team that had departed with the "Granddaddy of all Duke Losses": the overtime gut-squasher against Maryland in the 2006 NCAA title game.

Thus, last season initially was predicted to be more of an "underdog" Duke year, so to speak. Of course, it didn't turn out that way. The Blue Devils hit ACC play with an undefeated full head of steam. Then they ran through their league foes, stopping by Tennessee for a victory in January while they were at it. By the end of the regular season, with the Devils at 29-0, everybody had forgotten that they were not supposed to prohibitive favorites for the postseason.

I bring all this to us as contrast to this season, when Duke entered January with three losses and no air of invincibility … but a building feeling that everything was really starting to come together.

Duke's defeats so far came in succession: to UConn, Vanderbilt and Penn State. And even the subsequent win Dec. 6 over Rutgers -- Duke's 2007 NCAA Tournament Freddy Krueger -- didn't mean that all was perceived as well with the Blue Devils.

But that's to be expected. Duke has been the program by far the most on the public therapy couch in women's hoops for the last decade. Everything short of resurrecting Freud has been done to analyze what went wrong each NCAA Tournament for the Blue Devils.

Coach Gail Goestenkors, of course, had to think about this all the time, and her leaving for Texas last spring at least put some kind of conclusion on that particular frustrating path of analysis. Even if the answer she was left with ultimately was, "Who really knows why it happened?"

Now running the Blue Devil ship is Joanne P. McCallie, who was well aware when she came from Michigan State that a certain amount of sea sickness was inevitable for everybody.

"I think it's a process -- we're by no means where we will be or need to be," McCallie said as the Blue Devils entered ACC play. "The 'buying in' takes time. But what I would counsel most coaches who are going to move on is to think about what I call the double-whammy.

"It's the 'hit' from leaving somewhere that is tougher than the 'hit' from the doubters at the new school. Because you've kind of been in those situations before, where you're in a new place proving yourself.

"So to me, the hardest part was the leaving. Coming somewhere, you accept the conjecture and understand that people don't know you, and you don't know them. You can't expedite that, it just takes time."

Duke junior guard Abby Waner, who began the "buying in" process over the summer when she played for McCallie on the Under-21 USA Basketball World Championship team, said the back-to-back-to-back losses ended up being more good than bad for the Devils.

"We were very frustrated [by the Penn State loss], but we've also learned you can only hold on to a loss for so long," Waner said. "You don't want to forget it, because there are valuable lessons in losing. But you have to be able to move on. "The way we felt is, 'That's not supposed to happen; we don't lose like that.' We had a lot of meetings, talks, tough practices. Then against Rutgers, we really grinded to pull that one out."

McCallie, of course knew how the Blue Devils would feel going into the Rutgers game, the memory of last season's loss to the Scarlet Knights still a barely scabbed-over wound. But she cautioned her team against dwelling too much on that emotion.

"We talked about how we couldn't rely on the past; that wouldn't take us through the game," she said. "Only the present could. So we just had to dig things out together, and I felt that was a fun game that way. Several people made big plays in that game; it was very balanced."

And now … the Blue Devils have won eight in a row, including Friday's 70-38 clobbering of Florida State. Along the way, Duke has gotten healthier. Waner (ankle sprain), Wanisha Smith (spiral fracture in right hand) and Krystal Thomas (subluxed knee cap) all have battled injuries. Waner missed four games, and Smith and Thomas five games each.

Combine those injuries with the graduation losses of guard Lindsey Harding and center Alison Bales -- plus the Devils having a new coaching staff, and the caliber of their opponents -- and Duke's struggles in the non-conference really don't seem surprising at all.

In fact, you get the sense that the Blue Devils have found their bearings and a "new" identity that really isn't so drastically changed from what it has been for so long now.

"We use different offenses," Waner said. "We're not running quite as much as we did last year. We put in the match-up zone, and we're having good practices with that. Our press is coming along.

"You can talk about X's and O's, but we're still Duke. We're athletic, we like to push the ball, we like to press and trap."

Exactly. It's still Duke. Junior post Chante Black -- who redshirted last season with a knee injury -- is averaging 14.2 points and 7.1 rebounds. Waner is averaging 11.0 ppg.

There are plenty of those "extra-special" games coming up, all on national television. The Blue Devils go to Maryland on Monday (ESPN2, 7 p.m. ET). Tennessee visits on Jan. 28 (ESPN2, 7 p.m. ET). The second game against Maryland in Durham is Feb. 17. And the ultimate ACC feud -- against their very dear friends down the road in Chapel Hill -- has its 2008 renditions at Duke on Feb. 4 (ESPN2, 7 p.m.) and at North Carolina on March 2.

The trip back from Penn State in early December could have been a time to start panicking, to wonder if everything could slip away so quickly from Duke. How did McCallie and the Blue Devils keep from giving in to that feeling?

"The team and the staff stayed very much in one place emotionally," McCallie said. "It was difficult for everybody, but we knew what we're capable of doing. There are things we had to learn, and this team has gone through a lot.

"For lack of a better term, we've stayed in that objective reality. We recognized the injuries we had, and that the problems we were going through were real -- but solvable."

Mechelle Voepel of The Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com.