Basketball for UNC finds a way at Virginia, and snapping the losing skid wasn’t the only thing that happened.
Hubert Davis is now in his third season as North Carolina’s head coach and his 12th as a member of the Tar Heels’ staff but before Saturday he wasn’t even a coach at all the last time a UNC men’s basketball team won at Virginia. He was, that long ago, still an analyst at ESPN. Tyler Zeller, meanwhile, was a long ways away from wearing a headset, as he did here Saturday as part of UNC’s radio crew. He was, back then, the All-ACC center and soon-to-be conference player of the year who made the winning play, late, in that long-ago Tar Heels victory.
Marcus Paige was not a UNC assistant coach but instead still in high school, a season away from his first college season. Roy Williams, now retired for years, was only midway through his head coaching tenure with the Tar Heels. And the oldest of UNC’s players here Saturday, Cormac Ryan, was barely a teenager. And Ryan, himself, had to think on it in the locker room after UNC’s 54-44 victory — a victory that’d been a long time coming, given the Tar Heels’ semi-annual misery here for more than a decade.
“Man, I don’t even know,” Ryan, 25, said at first when asked how old he was in 2012, which had been the last time UNC had won at John Paul Jones Arena. “Yeah, I was 13. Twelve? Thirteen?” He wasn’t alone in the uncertainty. It’d been such a long time, the math didn’t come easily. The last time UNC had won here, in 2012, most of these players were in elementary school. “I think I was 10,” said RJ Davis, the Tar Heels’ senior guard. “I was 12,” said Armando Bacot, the fifth-year forward. “So I had to have been in sixth grade, seventh grade? Something like that?” “In 2012, I was 8 years old,” said Elliot Cadeau, the freshman point guard. Hubert Davis and his staff did not ignore the history in the days before the Tar Heels’ trip here. They didn’t embrace it, necessarily, either, but it was a talking point, this 12-year stretch of futility on the road against the Cavaliers — this weird streak of futility and frustration.
The Tar Heels had lost eight consecutive games at Virginia. Good UNC teams had lost here. Not-so- good UNC teams had lost here. Its 2017 national championship team had lost here. Its 2016 Final Four team, which nearly won a national championship, had lost here. Several very good point guards had never won here, from Paige to Joel Berry to Coby White to RJ Davis. And then, Saturday, it was Cadeau’s turn to lead the Tar Heels — who like to run, run, run — into a building where time stands still. Or maybe it’s just the opposing offenses that often do. Every year it’s the same thing when these teams play, the central conflict unchanged. UNC wants to play fast. Virginia wants to play as slowly as possible. For UNC, it’s like a sprinter preparing to run a race through quicksand. There’s no stopping the slowdown, or the ugliness; the hope is just to make it to the other side with some dignity and, with some luck, a victory. And finally it came, after so many somber trips home.
Be the first to comment