It doesn’t feel like six years have passed since Zion Williamson electrified Duke, the Triangle and all of college basketball simultaneously, somehow managing to eclipse all of the hype that preceded his arrival on campus.

An awful lot has happened since then, absolutely earthshaking stuff — Duke and North Carolina played in a Final Four, Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski retired, NC State broke its ACC title and Final Four droughts, NIL changed the game — and yet Williamson left an impression that still lingers, to the point where only his first name will suffice.

So while we clearly don’t need a generational freshman talent to have a good time when it comes to basketball, it doesn’t hurt when there is one.

Enter Cooper Flagg, the best freshman to arrive in the Triangle since Zion, and unlike Zion at this time in his freshman year, he’s already the consensus No. 1 prospect in the NBA draft.

The lanky, versatile forward is capable of doing just about everything and playing just about everywhere on the court. He’s not an athletic unicorn like Zion was, but his ceiling may be even higher. Distilled to the simplest possible terms: Paolo Banchero, only better. Time will tell.

The comparisons shouldn’t be between Flagg and Williamson as players, because that’s not the likeness they share. It’s their position as the lead player in their class, and whether a player like that can get Duke all the way to the finish line. Krzyzewski couldn’t do it with Zion. In his Duke tenure, Jon Scheyer has never been under anything like the pressure he’ll be under to make the most of Flagg’s one season in Durham.

That Zion season was a wild ride, propelled by the sense that someone was doing something that had never been seen in all the seasons of basketball history that stack on top of each other like old wallpaper here.

It wasn’t just that he lived up to the considerable hype his high school dunks conjured; he was a unique player on the court who overflowed with charisma off of it — one powerful enough to bust through a shoe and one compelling enough that a former president was there to see it. (“His shoe broke.”)

And then it fizzled to an end in Washington, one game short of the Final Four, when the ball wasn’t in his hands on the single most important play of Duke’s season. It’s still hard to do the math on that one. (Equally hard math: How much Williamson would have made if he’d come along a few years later in the NIL era. Flagg’s going to a Nike school and getting paid by New Balance to do it.)

In Scheyer’s third year, the stakes haven’t changed. Anything less than a trip to San Antonio will be a huge disappointment, and while he has an ACC tournament to his credit, the NCAA Tournament results haven’t been as promising — a desultory second-round loss in his first season and last spring’s Elite 8 loss to the Wolfpack, Duke’s second loss to NC State in less than three weeks.

There’s been considerable turnover from Scheyer’s first two teams, with only Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster returning among rotation players. There’s the usual batch of freshman talent — Flagg and Khaman Maluach top the list — and four incoming transfers, including Syracuse’s Maliq Brown and Purdue’s Mason Gillis.

It may be a different kind of group but the expectations are higher than they’ve ever been under Scheyer. There’s another generational talent in the Triangle. Let the ride be as wild as it was with the last one.

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