UNC basketball’s stunning, season-ending loss is befitting of the cruelty of March
There is a crushing finality to the end of an NCAA Tournament run, whether it lasts one game or five, that is difficult to describe unless it’s witnessed live and in person, from inside the kind of quiet and somber locker room where
North Carolina grieved here late Thursday night. The Tar Heels had just experienced an ending as sudden and cruel as there can be in sports.
The end of a game and of a season. The end of a team. The end of a long and heralded college career, in the case of Armando Bacot. The end, most of all, of all those hopes and dreams that fueled Bacot and his teammates for as long as they’ve been together, united toward a goal they believed not only possible but maybe probable, if they played their best.
UNC did not play at its best during an 89-87 defeat against Alabama during an NCAA Tournament West Regional semifinal. UNC (29-8), it could be argued, did not come close to playing its best. There was the woeful 25% shooting performance in the second half; the uncharacteristic off night from RJ Davis, the ACC Player of the Year who has usually been brilliant. There were the late-game breakdowns in execution — UNC failing to get much of a shot off in
the final moments, when it still had a chance. There was the Tar Heels’ inability to hold on to second-half leads of eight (just after halftime) and six (with eight and a half minutes remaining) and three (with 92 seconds left). There were a lot of other things that will undoubtedly linger.
And then there was the crushing, cruel finality. Just a day earlier there’d been so much joy inside UNC’s locker room. There’d been games among players and managers; light banter and joke-cracking representative of a team that’d grown close; the talk of the future, both the more immediate and that of the long term. And a little more than 24 hours later it was all over. A game, a season, and one team’s journey. The locker room became not a place of joy or bonding but of mourning. Just a day earlier the Tar Heels had been almost enamored with the setting, given the locker room they used here is the same one the Los Angeles Lakers always use. UNC players basked in knowing they were sharing the same space as LeBron James; walking on the same carpet through the same hall.
