UNC one shot short of NCAA championship, but Tar Heels set stage for Hubert Davis era
It was, roughly, the same spot where Caleb Love had made so much magic happen. He had a look at the rim, at the end of a busted play. The ball did not come close. North Carolina’s dream season came to an end. The Tar Heels finally woke up.
It will go down in the record books as the largest halftime comeback in the history of the national title game, Kansas coming back from 15 down to post a 72-69 win, but there was no shame in this for the Tar Heels. It became a battle of attrition, players going down and limping off and throwing up, and North Carolina never wavered.
Through this entire tournament, they had found ways out of impossible jams — the collapse against Baylor, the late comeback against UCLA, the cataclysmic win over Duke on Saturday — and they were within a minute of pulling off another great escape.
But when Armando Bacot, after playing the entire game on a balky right ankle, finally went out for good with 38 seconds to go, the Tar Heels were out of options. Their final four shots, three by Love and one by surprise second-half hero Puff Johnson, all missed.
In this moment, the pain of coming so close was overwhelming. In the season, the triumph of even getting to this point was astounding.
“We made it this far for a reason,” RJ Davis said. “This team was special. Glad to share memories and big games that we’ll all talk about and cherish forever. We’ve been through a lot this year. Faced adversity. Overcame it.”
Kansas came out swinging — David McCormack caught Brady Manek in the head with an accidental elbow — but North Carolina absorbed that early blow, hit back with defense and offensive rebounds and slowly took over the game. By halftime, the Heels were up 15 and in some kind of dream fugue state, having entirely flipped the script on Kansas from the 2008 semifinals. Bill Self went through two timeouts trying to slow the Tar Heels, to no avail.
Bacot secured his 31st double-double — tying David Robinson for the most in a season — before halftime, and his sixth of the NCAA tournament, a new single-tournament record. But the 15-point halftime lead lasted less than 10 minutes as Kansas came roaring back in transition, finally applying some game pressure to the Tar Heels. And as was the case Saturday night against Duke, every possession felt like the last, Hubert Davis jumping and hopping and swinging his fist through the air.
It became a battle of attrition, especially after Leaky Black picked up his fourth foul. Bacot played through the pain until he could no longer. Love limped through much of the second half on a balky right ankle of his own. And Johnson fell to his knees and threw up at one point after taking a shot in the stomach.
Bacot’s ankle finally gave out in the final minute, with the floor appearing to deflect under his weight as he tried to back down McCormack. He watched from the bench, his face in a towel, as McCormack scored over Manek at the other end. Love and Johnson had wild 3-pointers go wide. And North Carolina got one last chance with 3.2 seconds to go when Kansas stepped out inbounding the ball, but Love’s final attempt to tie was off the mark.
These were shots that had gone in for North Carolina, not just Monday but Saturday and in the previous two weeks. They did not fall in that moment. Yet another North Carolina season ended at the hands of Kansas — the “Kansas City Jayhawks,” according to NCAA president Mark Emmert.
That the Tar Heels were even in this position seemed like such a stupendous upset, at least by seeding and where they were in December, but it really was not. This was a top-20 team in the preseason polls, a team thought to be capable of this kind of success not only before this season but before last season, when its failure to live up to its potential essentially drove Roy Williams into retirement.
That it took this long for North Carolina to figure things out may make this an unexpected run to the brink of a championship, but not an unlikely one. The talent to compete with the best teams in the country was always there, but latent instead of fully realized, until March. Davis was finally able to coax the best from this team, through his optimism and belief, and not a moment too late, only to find a more talented team waiting at the end.
It typically takes a title for a team to be truly remembered by North Carolina fans, the inevitable result of so many decades of sustained success. Just ask the 2012 team, which saw its title hopes all but evaporate when Kendall Marshall broke his wrist in Greensboro, eventually dispatched by, yes, Kansas in St. Louis, along the banks of Williams’ once-loogie-lucky Mississippi.
But this team carved out a place of its own, almost against Duke alone, ruining Mike Krzyzewski’s Cameron farewell and then winning the long-awaited, long-feared Final Four battle to earn the right to play Kansas for a title. Its run through the NCAA tournament, at times dramatic, at others dominant, redeemed a first-year coach under tremendous pressure — forget about December, there were “fans” on Twitter who wanted him fired during the Baylor meltdown — and left behind more memories than some championship teams.
“I can’t remember a time in my life where, I should be disappointed, but I’m just filled with so much pride,” Davis said. “I’m so proud of these guys of what they have done for themselves individually, as a team, the way that they have represented our university, this program, our community. I can’t ask for them to do any more than what they have done. And I am extremely proud of each one of them.”
Only days more than a year ago, Williams walked away after two uncharacteristically poor seasons, a would-have tournament miss in 2020 and a first-round exit in 2021. Davis was elevated into the post, endured a difficult first few months and emerged at the end as one of the final two teams standing. Expectations, the kind that programs like UNC and Kansas and Duke and Kentucky face annually, were once again met.
The Tar Heels set the stage for a new era in a program that’s had a lot of eras. They were only one shot short.
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This story was originally published April 5, 2022 at 12:01 AM with the headline "UNC one shot short of NCAA championship, but Tar Heels set stage for Hubert Davis era."
