Mike Krzyzewski looked the kid in his eyes. The legendary head coach of the Duke University men’s basketball program was in West Orange, New Jersey, to watch a point guard named Kyrie Irving. Krzyzewski sized up the 16-year-old. Both of them can recount the moment, almost verbatim.

“He told me I was going to be one of the best of my generation,” Irving says years later, after a February practice at the Boston Celtics’ practice facility in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“I told him he was going to be one of the players of his era,” Krzyzewski — Coach K — recalls without prompting, about a week later from his office at Duke. “I saw everything in that kid.”

In October 2009, Irving, the top-ranked point guard and No. 3 overall player in the 2010 recruiting class, committed to Duke and Krzyzewski. How good was he, really? Well, the summer before his freshman year, in a tryout for USA Basketball’s under-18 squad, it took just four minutes of 5-on-5 before Irving was told he made the team. By the time he arrived on campus, Irving broke out moves in preseason pickup games that players, even some who’d reached the NBA, had never seen. Jay Williams, now an ESPN college basketball analyst, was a Duke point guard and the No. 2 overall pick in the 2002 NBA draft. “I realized Kyrie would be one-and-done,” says Williams, who was in some of those sessions, “before he even stepped on the court in college.”

Irving made the absolute most of his time at Duke until a freak injury eight games into the season (coincidentally against current Celtics head coach Brad Stevens’ Butler team) forced him to sit out most of his freshman year. Had he not missed those 26 games, Irving surely would’ve been in the conversation as the most dominant freshman in the history of college basketball — up there with 1977-78 Magic Johnson, 1989-90 Shaquille O’Neal and 2006-07 Kevin Durant.

Nearly a decade has passed since Irving averaged 17.5 points, 4.3 assists and 3.4 rebounds, while shooting 56.9 percent from the field and 46.2 percent from 3-point range, in just 11 games at Duke. “He likes to remind us all the time,” says Jayson Tatum, his Celtics teammate and another Duke one-and-done, “that it only took him 11 games to be the No. 1 pick.”

From that short foray at the NCAA level, Irving has grown into a genuine NBA superstar: the 2011 Rookie of the Year, a five-time All-Star and NBA champion. Now in his first season with the Celtics, only Irving truly knows the pressure his decision to leave Cleveland and challenge LeBron James for Eastern Conference supremacy places on his shoulders. But in a weird way, Irving, in his first season as point guard for the fabled Celtics franchise, is a freshman again.

This is a story of pain, pressure, sacrifice, swag and perseverance — in 11 games. This is the story of the education of Kyrie Irving.

Everyone quoted (and every arena) is identified by the titles they held during the 2010-11 college basketball season.