Of all the things that concerned the Duquesne basketball team Saturday, the one that mattered most was the final score.

Sure, that’s important every game — Duquesne edged George Washington, 67-65, at UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse on Jimmy Clark III’s two free throws with 2.1 seconds left, giving the Dukes their fourth straight victory and seventh in the past 10 — but this wasn’t just any old game.

No, in fact, it was:

• The final regular-season game with a chance of maintaining momentum heading into the Atlantic 10 Tournament this week. Duquesne (20-11, 10-8) finished the regular season 10-3 against its past 13 A-10 opponents after losing its first five A-10 contests.

• The annual Chuck Cooper Classic, played in memory of the former Duquesne star and Westinghouse graduate who was the first Black player drafted by an NBA team.

• Senior Day, honoring seven Duquesne players in their final home game, three who have spent multiple seasons on the team (Clark, Dae Dae Grant and Tre Williams) and four on a one-year status as transfer portal arrivals (Dusan Mahorcic, Andrei Savrasov and brothers Fousseyni and Hassan Drame, the latter twin in street clothes Saturday after undergoing knee surgery Feb. 28).

• Perhaps Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot’s final home game on the Dukes bench.

“You’re not going to get a straight answer from me on that one,” said Dambrot, eyeballing reporters with a wry expression. “Fair enough, right? It’s only right. I’ve got to protect my team.”

Dambrot, in the final season of an extended seven-year contract, has maintained a wait-and-see approach to a possible return next season — the school hasn’t commented publicly — especially if the Dukes fall short of the NCAA Tournament, where they haven’t appeared since 1977.

Their only hope of making the 68-team field appears to be with an automatic bid by way of winning the A-10 Tournament championship with four victories in five days at Barclays Center in New York.

Duquesne, which earned a bye for the first day, opens play at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday against the winner of a first-round game Tuesday between No. 11 Rhode Island and No. 14 Saint Louis.

On Saturday, before a feisty afternoon crowd, Clark scored 22 points, including his winning free throws that put him over 1,000 career points, and Duquesne survived George Washington’s hearty challenge to secure the sixth seed for the A-10 Tournament.

With the score tied at 65-65, Clark drove to the paint and was fouled with 2.1 seconds remaining. After he converted, GW was unable to get a good shot and the Dukes survived.

“He made a good drive and got contact,” Dambrot said. “He made his free throws, which with Jimmy sometimes is an adventure. But he made some big plays.”

While Duquesne’s narrow victory didn’t surprise Dambrot, it did offer a possible preview of what’s to come this week.

“This is a good test for us going into the tournament,” Clark said. “A lot of games are going to be close. Being able to fight it out and win with the experienced guys we have, it was good for us.”

Said Dambrot: “It was better for them, but it wasn’t better for me. I really don’t want to put myself through that misery every single second of every single game.

But, he added, “Everything hard is good for you. Anything easy usually isn’t good for you. Anything you’ve had to work for that you’ve earned is always good for you.”

The result gave Duquesne back-to-back 20 win seasons for the first time in more than 40 years.

It is the third 20-win campaign for Dambrot at Duquesne, sending him past Chick Davies for third place on the Dukes’ list of 20-win seasons, and the 15th overall in 22 Division I seasons. He won 20 games 12 times while coaching at Akron.

Davies, Duquesne’s all-time leader in victories (314-106 in 21 seasons), led the Dukes to two 20-win seasons from 1925-48.

Dudey Moore is Duquesne’s all-time leader with five 20-win seasons during a 10-year span from 1949-58. Red Manning produced four during a 16-year stretch from 1959-74.

Duquesne’s 20 victories follow a 20-13 record in 2022-23 and marks the first consecutive 20-win seasons since Manning’s teams accomplished the feat by finishing 21-4 in 1970-71 and 20-5 in 1971-72.

“I’m certainly not going to diminish a 20-win season because people think it’s easy to get 20 wins, but it isn’t,” Dambrot said. “It’s hard to get 20 wins, and we played a difficult schedule. But I’m proud of the guys’ resiliency and their toughness. And that goes for every one of them.”

George Washington (15-16, 4-14) came in having lost 12 games in a row before beating reeling St. Bonaventure on Wednesday at home.

The Revolutionaries rallied from an eight-point, first-half deficit — they trailed at halftime, 34-30 — to take leads of 45-41 and 52-48, the last time coming with 10:22 left on a 3-pointer by Darren Buchanan Jr.

A Williams dunk at the 9:10 mark pulled Duquesne even at 52-52, and Clark sank a pair of free throws to put the Dukes in front 54-52. From there, they never trailed.

Clark’s dunk with 3:23 to go put Duquesne up 63-58, but GW stayed close, tying the score twice, the last on a jumper by James Bishop IV with 42 seconds left, setting the stage for Clark’s final free throws.

The 6-foot-3 senior from Covington, Ga., becomes Duquesne’s third player this season to reach 1,000 career points, joining Fousseyni Drame, who also played at St. Peter’s and La Salle, and Williams (Indiana State).

Clark shot 7 for 18 and added four steals, three assists and two rebounds. David Dixon added 11 points and tied Williams for the team lead in rebounds with seven for Duquesne.

Buchanan led George Washington with 19 points. Bishop added 17, and Maximus Edwards chipped in 12.

“I’m not going to apologize for winning games like this because they’re tough games,” Dambrot said. “(The final score) didn’t really surprise anybody, did it?”

Perhaps it did.

But the Revolutionaries — the school previously known as the Colonials changed nicknames to start the year — possess a number of high-major transfers: Buchanan, Virginia Tech; Edwards, Kansas State; Bishop, LSU; and Babatunde Akingbola, Auburn.

“They had some issues with playing hard every night,” Dambrot said, “but I knew we were going to have our hands full because of what happened in the last game against St. Bonaventure. They decided they were going to guard, and they made shots. All of a sudden, they got some intravenous fed into their system, and so, we had a battle on our hands.”

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