NEW ORLEANS — It was, roughly, the same spot where Caleb Love had made so much magic happen. He had a look at the rim. 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. The end came quickly.
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 managed to secure 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. 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.
Bacot watched from the bench, his face in a towel, as McCormack scored over Manek. 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.
As the bumper stickers say, referring to Dean Smith and Roy Williams, “Kansas: The birthplace of North Carolina basketball.” Monday, yet another North Carolina season ended with a loss to Kansas.
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 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: Kansas, again, for the fourth straight time in the NCAA Tournament.
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.
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.
