Next time a coach invokes the basketball gods, take a moment to consider what is implied. He’s talking about luck, and not just luck as random chance, but as a force both subtle and direct.

Yet we’ve all been instructed to discount luck. There is no such thing as luck, we’ve been told. You make your own luck. Baseball's Branch Rickey famously intoned that luck is the residue of design.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous 19th century American thinker we never got around to reading, opined that “Shallow men believe in luck.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, revealed how keen observation and deductive reasoning could bring clarity to events that might otherwise appear beyond understanding.

Rationally, then, the shot goes in or it doesn’t, the pass is delivered perfectly or it sails just beyond the reach of a player positioned for a decisive basket. There is no mystery; these outcomes reflect proper and intensive preparation as well as skill, concentration, determination, conditioning, confidence, teamwork, coaching and the actions or inactions of the opponent.

But few of us believe either life or athletic competition can be reduced to a reasonable formula.

Instead, we know intuitively that some inexplicable force causes one player to land hard and get back on his feet with little more than a bruise, while another stumbles and blows out his knee. We know coaches are onto something when they invoke spiritual entities to explain fortune's twists and turns.

That's why no one batted an eye when Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski said, on the occasion of his 800th career win, a stunning rally at N.C. State last weekend, “Sometimes the basketball gods smile on you, and they smiled on us today.”

Clemson’s Oliver Purnell, like Krzyzewski a viable candidate for ACC coach of the year, apparently subscribes to a similar world view.

His Tigers suffered a pair of very tough defeats in overtime against North Carolina this year. The first, in the ACC opener for both schools, ended when Tar Heel guard Wayne Ellington hit a 3-pointer with time all but expired in the first extra period. Clemson had missed three point-blank shots at the end of regulation.

Now fast-forward about two months. Within a day of Duke’s escape, Clemson rallied from a 20-point deficit, then beat Maryland on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by freshman guard Terrence Oglesby.

But when it was suggested that Oglesby’s shot balanced out the crushing blow delivered by Ellington, Purnell quickly demurred. “Let’s not let the basketball gods off that easily,” he said.

The College Park comeback, punctuated by Oglesby’s shot, improved Clemson’s record to 21-7 and solidified its grip on third place in the ACC. The Tigers are assured a finish of no worse than fourth. The last time they finished higher in the league standings was 1990, when they were first.

Come to think of it, in the ACC’s previous 54 seasons, Clemson finished in the top three only six times. That makes Thursday’s game at Georgia Tech, followed by a home finale against Virginia Tech, their closest pursuer, unusually significant for the Tigers.

To prosper in those games, as well as in Clemson’s likely first NCAA appearance since 1998, Purnell needs his full contingent of players to effectively employ the pressing, trapping defensive style and the uptempo attack he prefers.

Clemson’s prospects for playing its game got a boost at Maryland when James Mays, the team’s best interior defender, finally discarded the bandage that protected his broken, non-shooting hand. Mays had a big night against the Terps, including a key steal that produced the tying basket in the final minute.

But, in a bit of cosmic leveling (or gods frowning) that seems too brutal to be coincidence, during the second half of the same game Cliff Hammonds, Clemson’s best perimeter defender, broke the wrist in his non-shooting hand.

Hammonds, his team’s No.2 scorer after fellow guard K.C. Rivers, took only one shot after incurring the injury during a fall subsequent to blocking a James Gist dunk.

Undeterred, Hammonds vows he will play against Georgia Tech. No surprise there. The architecture major, married with a child, is a picture of responsibility, “the best student-athlete I’ve ever been around,” Purnell said.

Of course, if only good things happened to good people, we wouldn’t need locks on our doors.

Rather than curse fate, Purnell explained he awaits more payback from the basketball gods. The Clemson coach is particularly keen on evening the score for the 11-point lead his squad almost magically squandered during the final 3:12 of regulation play during its double-overtime defeat at Chapel Hill on Feb. 10.

The odds are against Purnell getting his wish, particularly in postseason, when fortune has not exactly smiled on Clemson.

The Tigers are 8-7 in the NCAAs, 14-54 in ACC Tournament competition. Clemson remains the sole original ACC member without a title of any kind – ACC, NIT, or NCAA. Only once previously, in 1962, did Clemson even reach the finals of the ACC Tournament.

Given the closeness of their previous meetings, perhaps events will conspire to send Clemson against North Carolina in next weekend's ACC Tournament.  (How do events conspire, anyway, and would tapping their phones help to minimize the surprises?)

Maybe the Tigers will get to play for the ACC title. They're good enough. But they'll have to be lucky, too, whatever that means.