What just happened?
While all the talk is about Notre Dame’s 26-3 second-half run, the ACC Tournament championship game really turned on the first 11 unanswered points in less than 90 seconds that sent the Irish from eight down to three up. It left a spent Carolina team running on fumes and completed a collapse that included three Tar Heel turnovers and one attempted shot, a missed layup by Marcus Paige.
The 11-0 spurt almost instantly erased the hard-earned grind back from Notre Dame’s nine-point run in the first half and UNC’s own 14-2 burst to begin the second half, in which the Irish were denied a field goal for their first eight possessions. All that work, plus the adrenaline that kept the Heels going in their fourth game in four days, was gone. You could tell it as the air went out of a Smith Center-like atmosphere in the Greensboro Coliseum.
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Before that point, I caught myself thinking Carolina was going to beat its third ranked opponent in three days and be the first team to win the ACC Tournament in four games and Paige the incredibly deserving MVP. He personified the Heels’ outside shooting woes from the start (1-8 from the arc in the first half) as he missed his first four open three-pointers but courageously kept bombing away until the first one fell to reclaim the lead for his team.
It came from deep on the left wing as Paige hopped and pumped his fist when the ball went in for a 41-39 lead. Before Paige made another, he added an old-fashioned three-point play, Joel Berry drilled a 2 and a 3 and Brice Johnson and Isaiah Hicks exemplified the superb inside-outside stretch by combining for eight points in the paint.
We got it, I said to myself, thinking that Carolina’s nine-point lead with 9:59 left was enough to win its first ACC tournament in seven years and for Paige to cap a personally frustrating season as the MVP. The Tar Heels would climb all the way to a three seed in the NCAA tournament. It was all going to happen, I foolishly told myself. In the game of runs, Carolina’s last one had done in the Irish. Notre Dame looked incapable of winning this ultimate road game as the coliseum roared with every positive play. Then ND star and real tourney MVP Jerian Grant made a layup and his coach Mike Brey called a time out.
“We need three stops and we’re back in the game,” Brey told his team that obviously was not done. After Hicks made a free throw, Brey got SEVEN straight stops; the Irish now had the adrenaline and scored on 11 straight possessions to complete what Brey later characterized as a “lightning strike.”
Carolina, in a groove and looking like it could not fall apart this time, turned Humpty Dumpty as the stunned crowd watched the basketball tsunami that became the 26-3 run over seven minutes to an 80-66 deficit. The game was long over by then, and Paige made the 90-82 score look respectable with 10 more points; instead of a victory dance, merely mop-up time until Notre Dame celebrated its first ever major basketball championship.
Honestly, the Tar Heels didn’t lose their fourth ACC title game in five years as much as the senior-laden Irish took it from them with cold-blooded killer instinct that could not be stopped or matched. UNC had 18 more shots and made 53 percent of them, plus five more offensive rebounds, but sent the driving, slashing Irish to the line 32 times compared to only seven attempts for the Heels, who scored more than 40 points in the paint while drawing 10 fewer fouls than Notre Dame.
Carolina’s size advantage created mismatches that resulted in remarkable passing, cutting and shooting (10 of 20 from the arc) that left all five Irish starters in double figures at the end. You had to see what happened in the second half to believe it.
So where does Carolina go from here in the NCAA tournament and how long can the Tar Heels last?
As a four seed in the NCAA West Regional, they first face Tommy Amaker’s hard-to-handle Harvard team in Jacksonville, Florida, and if that comes to pass will draw the Arkansas-Wofford winner for a trip to the Sweet Sixteen in Los Angeles with top three seeds Wisconsin, Arizona and Baylor also expected to advance.
That would be an extremely daunting field, but Carolina showed a lot of heart and gumption in Greensboro by beating Boston College, 14th-ranked Louisville and No. 3 Virginia and having the 11th-ranked Irish on the ropes before “we panicked a little bit” (in the words of Roy Williams) and clearly ran out of gas over the last 10 minutes of the total 160 played.
It would have been some story. But there were glimpses of what ol’ Roy likes to call a “big-time team,” if not for the rest of this season than certainly for the next when everyone will be back a year older and wiser.
That’s more good news than the bad it looked like just a week ago.
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