The 2016 NCAA championship game was a true classic.

Full disclosure, I was in Houston for Villanova’s dramatic win over Carolina, but I did not watch the replay when I got home and hadn’t seen it until CBS showed it Sunday afternoon during the current halt of live sports.

The game was better than the 1982 win over Georgetown, which aired Saturday, largely because that was 34 years earlier and the quality of the broadcast did not compare to the high-definition TV of today.

You could hear the bounce of the ball, see every dramatic turn and the way it ended was heartbreaking but among the greatest finishes to any title game in any sport. Marcus Paige went from making a tying 3-pointer that might have lived forever in UNC annals to one that was upstaged by Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beater.

The Tar Heels’ gritty comeback from 10 down with 4:42 to play showed why Roy Williams has referred to that team as the best, and most unappreciated he has ever coached. Players who were great in the first half disappeared in the second and then re-emerged when we needed the most.

While the Heels might have played better defense on the last play, credit the Villanova point guard who set it up and Jenkins for making a long ball as time expired. It was a game neither team deserved to lose, but one had to.

The intensity of the defense on both ends jumped off the screen, and the frustration the offenses fought through to get key baskets was college athletics at its best. The swings were heart-wrenching, from Josh Hart blocking Justin Jackson’s layup at the end of the first half that easily could have been called a foul and resulted in a swing from a possible 9-point lead for Carolina at the break to five points.

The defeat was as bitter a pill to swallow for a program that had returned to the Final Four after an academic scandal that would have dismantled most. A year later, the Heels made it back and wrote another ending.

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