Different season, same story.

Every year, it seems, we're led to believe the Duke Blue Devils have transformed themselves back into a legitimate Final Four contender. Some years, it's because of their tough perimeter defense. This year, it's purportedly because they've finally got some size and a legitimate point guard.

But take them out of the familiar confines of the ACC, put them in a rowdy venue like the grayed-out Verizon Center on Saturday against an elite non-conference foe like seventh-ranked Georgetown, and you find out real quickly that not much has changed about Mike Krzyzewski's team.

They're still not that athletic. They're still limited up front. And, despite what that No. 8 ranking before their name would indicate, they're still not ready for a run to Indianapolis.

We've seen this movie before. Duke blazes impressively out of the gates, is confronted by its limitations (size, depth or athleticism) in the latter third of the regular season, then hits the wall in March. The Devils haven't won more than two games in an NCAA tournament since 2004, despite having No. 1 seeds twice and No. 2 seeds twice as well.

This is yet another good Duke team, with yet another set of apparent flaws. The big men (the young Plumlee brothers, Lance Thomas, Brian Zoubek) are still nothing special. The leading men, Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler, are still overworked. (Scheyer hasn't played fewer than 36 minutes in a game since December, and Singler has gone the full 40 in each of Duke's last two games.)

The Minutes will believe Duke might have a chance to win it all when it sees the Blue Devils actually advance past the Sweet 16 for the first time since Chris Duhon was in uniform.

The 7-1 Zoubek is making the most of his minutes. Zoubek is Duke's second-leading rebounder after Kyle Singler. The feat is more impressive considering he averages seven rebounds in 16 minutes per game. Alas, he also collects his share of fouls in that short amount of time. He has fouled out or picked up four fouls in 11 games this season. Still, rebounding was a problem going into the season, and Zoubek's performance has been a big surprise.

The downside of Hansbrough's automaton intensity? Rookie hazing is no fun for his teammates. He goes about the usual chores of bringing newspapers and donuts, but the trash talk has no impact. And why anger someone who's so eager to dish out punishment in practice?

Even the three former Duke players -- Dunleavy, Josh McRoberts and Dahntay Jones -- have given up.

"He doesn't take crap from anybody, so we'd be wasting our breath," Dunleavy said.

Krzyzewski's resume speaks for itself, but is there trouble brewing in Durham?

Duke continually recruits the nation's best high school players and, usually, lands the cream of the crop. Only recently, however, some of those players have opted to leave Coach K and the Duke program with more frequency.

The University announced Friday that sophomore forward Olek Czyz will leave the program and is expected to transfer to another Division I school to continue his college career as a student/athlete. While every athletic program, and university for that matter, is going to have a player (or student) leave for one reason or another, Coach K's program has been losing players at an alarming rate recently.

Czyz became the fifth scholarship player to leave the Blue Devil's program since 2006. While Czyz isn't exactly a household name and hasn't been a major contributor to the team during his short time at Duke, he is just the latest to make the jump from Duke to another school. And he certainly isn't the biggest name to defect.

Elliot Williams (now at Memphis), Eric Boateng (Arizona State), and Taylor King (Villanova) all left the Duke basketball program within one year of their arrival on campus and, more shockingly, all were McDonald's All-America honorees as high school seniors.

Coach K shouldn't exactly hit the panic button, as his program remains one of the best in the country and is currently ranked in the Top-10 of both the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls, but it appears, as the old saying goes, that 'something is rotten in Denmark.'

Every sport needs a villain, a Cobra Kai, the bad snotty guys who have everything and want more, the kids with the nice cars who only care about ascots, three-pointers, and hair gel. That's a comically wrong version of what Duke is, but so what? Having Duke around gives us all enemies. We all need enemies.

But what makes this even better is that there are more similarities than you might think:

1. Both Duke basketball players and the guys from Goodfellas get special treatment from authority figures, whether they wear badges or stripes.

2. Fortunes of the movie's characters and basketball team peak in the middle and then collapse down the stretch.

3. Main characters will be anonymous in a few years (Henry Hill went into witness protection, Jon Scheyer will go into NBDL).