It’s hard to imagine a more polite young man than Virginia Tech’s Zabian Dowdell.
He’s soft-spoken to the point where you have to strain to hear him in his postgame interviews.
Win or lose, good or bad, he always has time and he is, without fail, gracious.
But Dowdell was unusually subdued after the Hokies knocked off No. 1 North Carolina on Saturday. He was plenty happy.  He just wasn’t showing it as much as some of his teammates after the game.
The reason?
A week earlier, Tech won at Duke - a particularly gratifying victory given that Duke had beaten the Hokies the previous year on a last-second shot.
After the game, Dowdell was celebrating with his teammates.  One of the things he did was “pop” his jersey in front of the boisterous Duke student section.  You see it lots on TV. You don’t see it much out of Dowdell.  Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski whispered in Dowdell’s ear that Dowdell had too much class to be carrying on that way.
Dowdell took the message to heart, which is why, he said, he toned it down a bit after the Hokies beat UNC.
“I wanted to try to contain my [emotions] because of what Coach K told me last week,” Dowdell said. “I wanted to hold my feelings in.
“I don’t really want to step on anyone’s toes. Coach K is a legend in college basketball. To disrespect that guy or anything of that nature, that’s not good.”
Dowdell did jump on the scorer’s table after the game “but my emotions were not as wild as they were when we beat Duke.”