Story by Noah Monroe
At halftime of the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship, North Carolina led Kansas by 15 points.
North Carolina students were ecstatic, even those who only cared when the team scored more than 100 points and Bojangles distributed free biscuits.
They were ecstatic not only because UNC seemed to be on its way to its 7th national championship, but also because the team was redeeming the past two years of, well, misery.
Thanks to COVID, they’d sit in their rooms staring at a panel of people on Zoom trying to reinvigorate the passion that they had for college before March 2020. After class was over, they’d isolate, trying to avoid contracting the virus. Or worse, they sheltered at home with their parents. And younger siblings.
Two years of Zoom, masks, quarantines and vaccines.
Even basketball, a sport in which the program is considered a Blue Blood was underwhelming to the point that legendary head coach Roy Williams retired.
But now, now, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Tar Heels were on the cusp of a national championship. Twenty more minutes and the season would be saved. The last two years of college saved.
“I called my dad at halftime, and I said, ‘UNC is going to win the national championship while I’m a student here,’” Zachary Crain said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
‘This wasn’t the school I came to’
Riley Lachance was buzzing with excitement as he sat in the Dean Smith Center and got ready for student orientation to start.
He was just months away from being a freshman in college.
In his orientation group, he spotted a familiar face and started to cycle through his mind about who it could be.
Being in the basketball arena helped Lachance to recall who the person was. It was Cole Anthony, the third-ranked player in the Class of 2023 and future UNC starting point guard.
Five months later in November 2019, Lachance watched Anthony score 34 points in his Tar Heel debut, setting off what many thought would be a successful season.
It wouldn’t be.
North Carolina would struggle with injuries throughout the 2019-20 season and fail to meet the expectations placed on them. The Tar Heels posted a losing record for the first time since the 2001-02 season.
A day after their loss in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, the rest of the tournament was cancelled, and soon after, the NCAA Tournament was cancelled as well due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
North Carolina was on spring break at the time with classes set to resume March 16, but spring break was extended and ultimately, classes went on to Zoom.
“It’s crazy” Neil Pierre-Louis said. “I went out with one of my friends the weekend before spring break. I was like, ‘I’ll see you in a couple weeks.’ He transferred, and I never saw him again.”
For the next two months, students sat at home staring at professors giving lectures and sulking over having to spend their days with their parents. This wasn’t the college experience they had expected.
“That was the worst time,” Kaitlyn Schmidt said. “I remember being home and having the realization set in that I wasn’t going back for my freshman year. I felt sick to my stomach at the fact of that.”
“It was very depressing time,” Lachance added. “That summer was brutal. I think everyone felt isolated. It sucked that freshman year got cut short, but everyone had the hope that things would start opening up again.”
And they would.
Despite the pandemic spreading, UNC started the 2020 fall semester with students on campus It was a disaster. Less than two weeks after classes began, everyone was sent home and classes went back online.
“It sucked because I wasn’t hanging out with anyone,” Pierre-Louis said. “Walking around campus was depressing because I remember how crowded it was during my freshman year and now there was nearly nobody.”
The once colorful campus was now a cold reminder of what the entire world was going through.
“Most days I would just sit in my apartment,” Matthew Leder said. “I would wake up, turn my computer on and sit on Zoom until my classes were done and then play video games with my roommates. They were really the only people I hung out during that time.”
The sporting world was no exception. Instead of sell-out crowds, there were now cardboard cutouts of people with a minimal number of fans allowed to attend.
On top of all of this, North Carolina basketball didn’t feel like North Carolina basketball.
The 2020-21 team went 18-11, making the NCAA Tournament as an eight-seed, but lost in the first round to Wisconsin by 23 points — their first first-round exit since 1999.
Less than two weeks later — on April Fool’s Day, dadgummit – Roy Williams announced his retirement. He said he was no longer able to evaluate his team as well as he had previously been able to.
The man he thought was right for the job was the last player he ever recruited to North Carolina and his assistant coach for the previous 10 years, Hubert Davis.
‘We have to run’
Walking off the court after a surprising 76-67 loss to Pittsburgh last February, graduate forward Brady Manek’s face was red.
Red from embarrassment, red from frustration, and red from sadness.
Manek had left it all on the court, and now in his lone season in Chapel Hill, he and the Tar Heels were one step closer to missing the 2022 NCAA Tournament rather than a step closer to making it as many thought they’d be.
With just five games left before the ACC Tournament, they were running out of time to prove to the tournament committee that they were deserving of one of the 68 spots in March Madness.
Then a switch was flipped in the North Carolina locker room.
The Tar Heels went on a four-game winning streak, including a victory in a back-and-forth game against Syracuse in which UNC returned each blow from Syracuse with one of their own.
All that was left on the schedule for the Tar Heels was a date with Duke in Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium
But in the two Tobacco Road rivals previous meeting in Chapel Hill a month earlier, North Carolina was run out of its own gym, losing by 20 points.
Everyone was counting out UNC before the game started – even the student body.
“I didn’t think they had a chance, so I went to the Charlotte FC game,” Crain said. “There was no reason to be in Chapel Hill. The expectations from the previous years had been so low I didn’t see a reason to stay.”
Yet, North Carolina kept up with their rival.
With just under four minutes to go in the game, UNC had stolen the momentum and the spotlight from Coach K and Duke, leading by eight points. Unlike the game in 2020 though, North Carolina made sure they shut the door, ultimately winning 94-81.
The ensuing scene on Franklin Street was chaos with students on each other’s shoulders and people hurdling burning couches like it was the Olympics.
The Tar Heels had done enough to make it into the NCAA Tournament field, earning an eight-seed for the second consecutive year and a first-round matchup against Marquette. This year though, thanks to beating Duke in their regular season finale, Chapel Hill was optimistic.
But even through the optimism, caution sat front and center in people’s minds, they had seen this movie before.
“I didn’t know how to feel,” Pierre-Louis said. “I was optimistic, but even then, I didn’t know whether or not Marquette was going to be like the Wisconsin game was in 2021.”
North Carolina defied expectations and blew out Marquette, winning by 32 points, their largest margin of victory all year. After three years, the students finally saw North Carolina win an NCAA Tournament game.
The question on everybody’s mind after that point was if they’d be able to win a second game. It wouldn’t be an easy task as they had to go up against the No. 1 seed in their side of the bracket in Baylor, the reigning champions.
UNC was up by 25 will 11 minutes left in the game and Manek had just hit a three-pointer, giving him 26 points. But in almost predictable fashion, it began to fall apart for North Carolina.
Manek was given a technical foul and was ejected from the game which Baylor used this to their momentum. Over the next 10 minutes, they outscored the Tar Heels 38-13, tying the game, and sending it to overtime.
North Carolina would gain their wits and win the game in overtime, shocking Baylor, and the college basketball world, but especially their own fans.
“Once Manek got ejected and Baylor started to comeback, I thought for sure we were going to lose in overtime,” Leder said. “UNC fought back though, and somehow they won the game.”
Against UCLA in a Sweet 16 tilt, they were down at halftime with it being clear that UCLA was the better team in the game. Then, guard Caleb Love helped propel the Tar Heels to a 73-66 victory and an Elite Eight matchup against Saint Peter’s.
“I picked (UNC) to lose in the first round,” Crain said. “After they didn’t lose in the first round, I picked them to lose in the second round. And then when they played UCLA, I picked them to lose. After that, I told myself that wasn’t going to pick them to lose anymore no matter who they’re playing because at that point it seemed like they had fate on their side.”
The game against Saint Peter’s was the first time in the entire tournament that North Carolina was the clear favorite coming into the game. For the first time since the opening round, the Tar Heels won handily and ended the Peacocks run, winning by 20 points, and playing the villain.
Next up for UNC in the Final Four was their own villain, Duke and Coach K.
North Carolina and Duke had never met in the NCAA Tournament, let alone in the Final Four, and what a perfect time for it.
In Coach K’s final season, he could enact revenge on the Tar Heels for making his last game in Cameron Indoor Stadium a loss and do so on a national stage in which he could go to the national championship if he won.
It was the perfect situation for Duke.
In Chapel Hill, pessimism again ran through campus. Would the Tar Heels be able to beat Duke again?
“I thought we were screwed,” Pierre-Louis said. “The narrative was lining up for Coach K to get his final revenge on UNC in the Final Four and win the National Championship.”
Like their previous game against Duke, UNC kept it close, as neither team was able to get separation from the other. But with 26 seconds left, Love pulled up for an improbable three-pointer over Duke’s 7-foot center Mark Williams.
“It felt like that shot hung in the air longer than it actually did,” Joe Laird said. “When it finally went in, the student section was pandemonium. Everybody was jumping up and down.”
Once the buzzer sounded and the game was officially over, Kaitlyn Schmidt remembers screaming, “We have to run,” and dropping whatever she had in her hands and engaging in a full-on sprint to Franklin Street, Chapel Hill’s main drag.
Franklin Street transformed int a Mardi Gras-style funeral for Coach K. Nobody cared that North Carolina hadn’t won the national championship yet. All that mattered was that Coach K would never get another chance to beat UNC.
“I had tears streaming down my face,” Schmidt said. “It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life. In that moment, it felt like everything was real again, post-COVID, an actual Franklin Street rush. I realized I was finally witnessing the basketball school I had heard about.”
In the national championship two days later, UNC led Kansas by 15 points at halftime. Nobody cared about just beating Duke anymore. They wanted it all.
“At halftime I was posting about how UNC was going to win,” Leder said. “I was thinking about what Franklin Street would look like and I was already planning how I was going to celebrate after the game ended.”
But they didn’t win the national championship. Kansas did, coming back from a 16-point deficit.
Instead of Franklin Street bursting into another party, it was the scene of college students walking back to their apartments and dorms. No longer did they have basketball on their minds, only the fact that they had class the next day.
But gradually the loss started to sting less and less, spirits lifted. After all, the basketball team went on the most improbable one-month run from “wait til next year” to “we’re in the national championship!” Not only that, UNC had beaten Duke twice, and sent Coach K home with an L in his last game.
Not so bad.
Then, hope soared. One-by-one, four of the five starters on the team announced that they weren’t done. They had unfinished business. They were coming back for one last ride.
“This year’s experience showed me that I do not want to miss the chance to do it again next season,” center Armando Bacot announced. “My Carolina story isn’t finished this year, next season starts right now.”
