The ‘Did Duke Win?’ Guy Didn’t Mean to Dunk on Duke

As best as Alex Galonsky can remember, diddukewin.com started because he missed coding.

It was 2010, and he was a Duke University junior spending the semester in Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan Province, for an intensive Chinese language and culture program. Galonsky was a computer science major, but there were no classes in the subject he could take while studying abroad.

Around the same time, Galonsky happened upon isitchristmas.com, a bare-bones website that gives nothing more than a yes or no answer to its titular question. He thought it was funny, then he thought of a Duke-centric homage. Once he found a deal that let him register the domain name for $1, “Did Duke Win?” was born. 

The site, and related social media accounts, answers its own titular question about Duke men’s basketball games in the same pared-down fashion. 

“It was mostly a lark,” Galonsky said. 

He had no idea he’d still be updating the website 15 years later, much less that the bulk of its visitors would be fans gloating about the—admittedly infrequent—Duke losses by sharing the website’s big, glaring “NO” across social media.

Fan accounts for rival teams, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the University of Kansas, post the link whenever their teams beat Duke. Famous Tar Heel alumni love to post it. Even a famed Maryland seafood restaurant has shared it. The official X accounts of North Carolina State State and the University of South Carolina have gotten in on it. It’s such a feature of Duke-hating that it’s a staple of the college basketball subreddit. The actress Elizabeth Banks even shared “Did Duke Win?” once.

“I don’t have hard feelings about it,” said Galonsky, once a fervent Duke basketball supporter. “It’s all just fun and funny to me.”

Still, Galonsky was wary of being connected to the website. For the past 15 years, he tried to keep his identity anonymous. It wasn’t so difficult: He didn’t put contact information on anything, and no one ever reached out to unmask the site’s creator. 

There wasn’t a particular reason for keeping the secret, Galonsky said. It was just his default approach to digital life. “People on the internet can be weird and crazy,” he noted. 

Galonsky did occasionally claim credit using an anonymous social media account, which The Assembly was able to connect to an account on the code-sharing platform GitHub that included his name. When asked for proof that he was the website’s creator, he sent this reporter a link to a new page even more barren than its parent website that reads: “hi matt it’s alex.”

Over all the time that Galonsky has been running his little joke of a pet project website, it’s collected tens of thousands of views a year.

Unfortunately for any Duke haters hoping “Did Duke Win?” could definitively rank Duke’s most embarrassing losses over the past decade and a half, Galonsky says he lost all of the website’s pre-2023 visitor data when Google Analytics migrated to a new tracking code. But March 21, 2014, sticks out in his memory as having the highest traffic numbers. That was the day when No. 14 seed Mercer upset Duke, the No. 3 seed, in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

“From what I can tell, I think the popularity has waned a little bit,” he said.

In the past couple years, according to Galonsky, the highest day of traffic was the 60,000-odd visitors who came on March 10, 2024, a day after UNC-Chapel Hill beat the Blue Devils in Durham to secure the ACC regular season title.

“Before that, some of the peaks were in the hundreds of thousands,” he said. 

Galonsky didn’t mention the two most famous Duke losses—in Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game against UNC-Chapel Hill, then again to the Tar Heels in the Final Four a month later—but his server billing data does show a sizable spike in March and April of 2022.

Now a software engineer in the Boston area, Galonsky is still maintaining “Did Duke Win?,” even though he’s less active as a basketball fan. The day-to-day updates are automated, using data scraped from the Duke athletics website. But when X changed access to the API Galonsky used to automatically post there, he rebuilt the feature on Mastodon. He’s since settled on Bluesky.

“In more recent years, the site has been an excuse to toy around with different technologies and stuff,” he said, noting that he’s rewritten its code multiple times. “I take some fun in really over-engineering certain parts of it,” he added.

Running “Did Duke Win?” has provided a small bit of ongoing joy, rooted in the country’s most famous basketball rivalry—one Galonsky is happy to keep alive in its pure state.

“A lot of friends asked me why I don’t sell ads on the site,” he said. “I don’t think it would make that much. It would just make the site look worse. I think the nice thing about it is it’s just so simple. It’s mainly just one word.”