By Adam Lucas MILWAUKEE—This isn’t going to be easy. The Carolina basketball season ended Friday night at the hands of Ole Miss, 71-64. Now we have to assess how to feel about that. Any end of the Carolina basketball season is bad. Well, except for 1982, and 1993, and 2005, and 2009, and 2017, and some of you still remember 1957. Most programs would have their television screen permanently split-screened with Joe Lunardi’s face to have that many exceptions. All the other years, though, the end was sheer misery. Heck, in 1998 we got to watch Ed Cota throw lob passes to Vince Carter for six months, and at the end…depression. In 2008 we saw Tyler Hansbrough have one of the best years any Tar Heel has ever had, and at the end…misery.
In 2016 we were able to watch Marcus Paige be Marcus Paige, and at the end there was…devastation.
So even in the best of years, the end isn’t fun. And this was not the best of years. So what was it? It was complicated. There were times that this version of the Tar Heels was not very much like a Carolina basketball team. Times like, well, the first half, when Mississippi was tougher, more competitive and better than the Heels.
“They brought the competitive fight in the first half,” Hubert Davis said. “In every category and angle in regards to physicality they not only won, they dominated us.”
It was an unpleasant reminder of what this team had been. After all, we had seen this before. We saw it as early as November 8, a first half blowout against Kansas. There were other instances as recent as a week ago against Duke, so perhaps no one should be surprised that this was the way it ended.
“We were lifeless in the first half,” Seth Trimble said. “We had no passion, no joy.”
But there was also the second half. “We knew the comeback was coming,” Ole Miss head coach Chris Beard said. And it did. Suddenly there was Elliot Cadeau getting six second half assists to go with his three steals, and Jalen Washington transforming into a ferocious dunking machine, and the Tar Heels relentlessly getting second chance opportunities.
That part was fun. The comeback against Dayton: breathlessly fun (getting down 21 points to the Flyers was not as fun). Beating UCLA in the Garden was fun and so was throttling SMU and winning six straight games when everyone said they couldn’t—that’s the way I want to remember this season. But making those comebacks by definition required digging a big hole, which is ultimately how the season ended. Sometimes being a Tar Heel was not much fun. And you can say it is always a great day to be a Tar Heel but that tells me you don’t remember the night of the Clemson game. You want to know how complicated this whole thing is? I looked across the court at the Fiserv Forum on Friday afternoon, and as Carolina closed the gap to two points, there, on the very front row near midcourt, were what appeared to be a father and son leading the Tar Heel cheers—all while wearing Duke jerseys. What…is…happening?
For maybe the last time ever, we got to watch a five-year Tar Heel, RJ Davis, play much bigger than his listed size would indicate. Davis always seemed to understand what it meant to play for Carolina, and even in the NIL era that still matters, right?
Right? “The past five years are the greatest five years of my life,” Davis said after the game. “It’s bigger than basketball. The relationships and friendships I’ve built here…everyone who has played a role in my five years of being here, I’ll remember them for the rest of my life. Basketball is one thing. Life is more about who has impacted you and who you bring along with you. The years I’ve spent here, I will keep that with me forever. I’m grateful for the chance to put this jersey on, because not many people get to.”
Life’s like this: I don’t know if I love college sports right now but I love RJ Davis. Carolina was on track to be one of the worst three-point shooting teams in program history this season until they were one of the hottest three-point shooting teams in the country for six weeks until they ended the year 5-for-24. These particular Tar Heels would sometimes play poorly enough to make the most diehard fan turn the television off but if you did that you might miss an epic comeback, which they also did regularly.
Never try to make sense out of any of this. How crazy are we? When I think about January 2025, I think about it being cold and cloudy almost every single day. When I think about the last six weeks, I mostly think of pleasantly warm temperatures before the pollen hits, the kind that make you want to ride down Franklin Street with the windows down. Is any of that actually true? I’m guessing the meteorological data doesn’t bear me out. But when Carolina is winning, everything just feels a little better. I suppose I hope everyone has something in their lives that has such a profound impact on their world view. But I would also like to acknowledge it is a little demented.
I’m frustrated the Heels aren’t playing any more games and mad that I let this team do this to me again but I’m sad that the sliver of hope they’d provided since mid-February is now gone. This last month was fun and now it’s over. Yesterday I was fully invested in the NCAA Tournament and could have told you some key matchups in every region. Today I am not sure who is playing.
Now we enter the offseason, a world that could mean almost anything in modern college basketball. RJ is gone. Some Tar Heels will be back and some won’t.
Next year’s roster will have three incoming freshmen and will almost surely have some new players we aren’t expecting and at some point around mid-October, we’ll start to be excited about the new group. By Thanksgiving they will have made us mad enough to throw the remote at least once. That’s actually very good news—it’s part of moving on to new teams and new players (I’m still going to wear my RJ Davis shirt, though).
At some point in the future, someone will ask us about the 2025 team. And we’ll have to wonder how much time they have, because the answer is very complicated.
