Yes. Real basketball, involving Duke University, a serious American college basketball team. In Dubai, in the UAE.

Almost an out-of-body experience. Coach K sitting at courtside. Austin Rivers, Doc’s highly regarded son, starting for the Blue Devils. A plethora of Plumlees. ESPN cameras. A near-capacity crowd to see Duke win 86-66.

Never thought I would see any of that on this side of the Atlantic.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of all?

The UAE national team actually hung around. Never trailed by more than 22 and got it down to 15 in the fourth quarter of the game (played under international rules).

I covered the game for The National, and it was a bit of a test, journalistically. Game tipped off at 9:30 p.m. (had to start well after local Muslims break their Ramadan fast), and even with an 11:30 p.m. deadline, it was a tough finish. Plus, organizers failed to provide a box score (nor a press table), and for my hastily banged out game story I was reduced to keeping track of individual scorers myself, while typing on a laptop perched on my knees.

At a clinic run by Mike Krzyzweski the night before, while the Dukies practiced at the Al Wasl club’s modest gym, I canvassed several coaches who are based here in the UAE, asking them to predict the final score of the game. The predictions ranged from 97-62, at the flattering end, to 100-73, 113-41 and 125-46.

“To make it a game,” one coach from the Balkans said, “Duke must play with their left hands only.”

Turns out, the UAE, of all places, has a competitive team. Not a good one; if they were, they would have won more than one game during a 15-game stretch against other Asian teams earlier this month in Taiwan and China. But some of these guys can play.

The best is Rashid Al Zaabi, a reed-thin but lightning-quick guard who scored a team-best 14 points. The country has two other small, quick guys in the backcourt, a plodding by confident shooter in Omar Al Omeri and a couple of middling “bigs” who seem to understand the basics of positioning (though they were crushed 47-26 on the boards by the bigger Dukies) and can shoot a little.

Not that Duke was ever in trouble. The Dukies clearly were tired and perhaps discombobulated by the dimensions of the gym, which are odd — the baskets are not close to the walls, as in a high school, but neither are they backed by rows of rising seats, as they would be in a big arena. Coach K had mentioned that it might be a problem, and it was early, when Duke was casting off threes and missing badly. Duke’s guys also never got the range from the line; they were a wretched 8-for-25 to the UAE’s 20-for-33.

It was 9-9 halfway through the quarter.

Rivers, who might be better than his father, the former NBA regular who is the coach of the Boston Celtics, changed the complexion of the game by taking the ball to the basket in the second quarter, scoring 10 points as Duke put some space between themselves and the home team.

(Though it should be noted that the mostly American crowd of perhaps 4,000 seemed to be pulling for Duke, especially the blue-shirted fans seated in the “Cameron Crazies” section of the stands.)

Andre Dawkins heated up from three-point range in the second half and finished with six threes and a game-high 20 points, and Mason Plumlee, the second oldest of the three Plumlees on the Duke squad, scored 17 points and took 15 rebounds.

And why was this game even being played? Duke was at the tail end of a two-week, round-the-world trip, the sort allowed to U.S. college teams by the NCAA once every four years, and the Dukies played three games in China, including in Kushan, where Duke is going to open a satellite campus, and here in Dubai, where Duke will open a business school. In a sense, it was advance branding for areas about to produce more Duke alumni. Plus, it gave a young team a chance to do some bonding in exotic conditions.

The upshot of these two days of Duke-UAE hoops for the newspaper is that we are far better informed about basketball in the country. It exists. It isn’t horrible. The country has seven professional clubs, albeit low-profile and little-supported. Also, the game is very much skewed toward Dubai; only one club in Abu Dhabi, the Emirate with the capital city of the same name, has a basketball team.

We will be watching to see if the UAE can stage some massive upsets and actually win a London 2012 Olympic berth at the Fiba Asia Championships in China next month.

Considering they gave the jet-lagged Dukies a game, and that the UAE played without their best big man, they’ve got a puncher’s chance.

And I might even have a little more domestic basketball in my future.