When it was finally over, late on the night of Saturday, March 9, 1974, Monte Towe didn’t bother joining the celebratory net cutting. Instead, the tiny North Carolina State Wolfpack point guard sat next to the wife of his coach, Joan Sloan, and hugged her through tears.
“I felt a lot of pressure,” Towe says. “We had won almost every game we’d ever been in, but we still had to win one more to get where we wanted to go. Afterward, I was just drained by the pressure of the situation and the high level of the game.”
The level of the game was, by acclimation of those in the Atlantic Coast Conference, unparalleled. North Carolina State 103, Maryland 100, in overtime of an ACC tournament final played in a smoke-filled Greensboro Coliseum, during the days before multiple NCAA bids for the same conference, was declared by many to be the greatest men’s college basketball game ever played. It retained that gilded designation until Christian Laettner stuck a dagger in the Kentucky Wildcats in 1992. Even now, 50 years later, you can still find a few holdouts who believe that Wolfpack vs. Terrapins showdown is the true gold standard of the sport—a 203-point masterpiece in the days before the shot clock or the three-point arc.
