PHILADELPHIA — It would have to be now. It would have to be this year.
This game, if it is ever to be played, and there’s no stopping it now, should be for the highest stakes there are. If it can’t be for a national title, and there was a chance of that in 1991, then the combination of Mike Krzyzewski’s final season and an improbable tournament run from North Carolina will have to do.
Saturday night. New Orleans. Duke. North Carolina. Final Four. Cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria.
At times, this season has felt like a Duke infomercial, thanks to Krzyzewski’s prolonged departure. North Carolina has put itself on even terms now, seeds and records and rankings and retirements aside. The Tar Heels have crashed the party, and they earned their invitation.
“We battled through so much this year, just to have the fight and the adversity we had to go through,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said. “It was special.”
North Carolina stomped out the hopes and dreams of 15th-seeded Saint Peter’s in short order on Sunday, cruising to a 69-49 win to complete as remarkable a run to the Final Four as any in school history, matching the 2000 team that made the same run as an eighth seed, starting the season sixth in the AP poll before staggering to the finish of the regular season.
But this is a team unto itself, taking its own meandering journey to this point, making Hubert Davis the first first-year coach to take his team to the Final Four since Bill Guthridge did it at UNC in 1998. Unlike Guthridge — in 1998 or 2000, for that matter — Davis had fewer pieces in place, more work to do.
Dean Smith left Guthridge a muscle car with the keys in the ignition. Roy Williams — who sat nine rows behind the North Carolina bench Sunday — left Davis a team Williams felt he could no longer reach. Davis, with the essential and unforgettable addition of hirsute hero Brady Manek, somehow found a way through.
“It’s perhaps, for me, the greatest moment in my basketball career,” Williams told the News & Observer as he watched the celebration from his seat, nearly overcome with emotion. “I’ve never had any more faith and love for one man and to think that he’s just won it — he’s been better than I ever was, right now.”
For Davis, the feeling was mutual.
“When we were on the podium,” Davis said, “I looked right at him and said, ‘Thank you.””
Nobody would have been all that surprised, in December, to see Duke in New Orleans in March. The Blue Devils have transformed themselves in the past two weeks into something fierce and furious, but it was there all along. Everyone knew it.
But no one, other than Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner — broken clock and all that — saw North Carolina coming, a suddenly relentless juggernaut that knocked off two of last year’s Final Four teams before making short work of a minnow that had already swallowed two sharks.
Everyone knew North Carolina should have been better than the Tar Heels were for most of the year, and Davis took a lot of undeserved heat for that as he tried to mold an identity for this team from what was, at the time, a collection of disparate parts. They’re in sync now, with a shortened bench and defined roles that give all five starters the oxygen to be the best version of themselves.
In the process, they have given themselves a chance to ruin Krzyzewski’s sendoff — again! — and, no big deal, also earned the right to play for a national title. Duke, which claimed its own spot in New Orleans on Saturday on the opposite coast, can avenge the Tar Heels’ victory in Krzyzewski’s final home game and move into position for the ultimate farewell.
Davis, a fellow alum with his own history against Duke – not to mention a close friendship with Christian Laettner – will have no less skin in this game, the first postseason meeting of the teams since the 1971 NIT, the first-ever in the NCAA tournament.
What else can we pile on?
Is there anything else we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this game?
Is it possible?
“I don’t think anything can be as crazy as it was leading up to the game in Cameron,” Davis said.
North Carolina and Duke in the Final Four would be apocalyptic even with none of that going on. But under these circumstances, the stakes are forever.
Duke star Paolo Banchero wanted North Carolina in the ACC tournament, even if he was more circumspect about his wishes Saturday night. As RJ Davis stamped the North Carolina sticker onto the bracket, the fans chanted, “We want Duke.”
They’re all going to get what they wanted.
