NEW ORLEANS — They’re hellbent on staging one more game here. What gall.
Hangovers of all kinds remain acute from the North Carolina-Duke colossus of Saturday night, yet the bright lights of the Superdome will turn on Monday night for North Carolina vs. Kansas, proving that if you stick around long enough with March Madness, you might even see a national championship game between North Carolina and Kansas turn up as some sort of eccentric afterthought.
“I feel a little bit of that, too,” North Carolina senior leader Leaky Black said Sunday. “You know, we knew it was Duke and Carolina, it was going to get a lot of media, but I mean, at the end of the day, this is the national championship. We don’t really care how much media it has. We have one more game so we can bring something home and be remembered forever in North Carolina history. So we’ve just got to throw all that stuff out the window.”
Notes: They’re going to be remembered forever in North Carolina history regardless of outcome because of Saturday night, when Mike Krzyzewski’s career ended, and good grief, that’s so much to throw out a window that you might be wise to use a door — a garage door.
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North Carolina-Duke, an 81-77 classic in which the players overcame the outrageous bigness of the game with impressive goodness down the stretch, featured two of the four winningest men’s programs ever. North Carolina-Kansas features two of the top three, yet it’s the upstart figuring to bang its head against the impossible as it tries to keep up with North Carolina-Duke.
Somehow, some other game might obscure not only a championship game but a championship game with the incredible entanglements of North Carolina-Kansas, a game of which North Carolina big man Armando Bacot said, “Man, it’s going to be an unreal feeling, just two big-time programs going against each other.” Yet if one unreal feeling follows one deeply unreal feeling, how unreal can it be?
To review some of it: Dean Smith played and coached at Kansas before becoming a Zeus at North Carolina, and Larry Brown played and coached at North Carolina before winning one of only three national championships at Kansas, and Roy Williams coached at North Carolina before coaching at Kansas before coaching again at North Carolina, and they have played six times in NCAA tournaments, including four Final Fours, including a legendary 1957 final involving Wilt Chamberlain and a 2008 semifinal toward Kansas Coach Bill Self’s one national title, and then there’s the thing about the human condition that came up Sunday.
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First-year North Carolina coach Hubert Davis disclosed that for years he engaged in a form of self-torture.
It involved the 1991 national semifinal in Indianapolis between North Carolina and Kansas, in which Williams coached against Smith; Kansas won, 79-73; Davis scored 25 points as a Tar Heels junior; Smith got tossed after two technical fouls; and North Carolina wound up mad and sad. Just as the Kansas-Villanova game of Saturday served as undercard to a loud, shiny North Carolina-Duke, that North Carolina-Kansas game of 1991 served as undercard to a loud, shiny Duke-UNLV.
“The ’91 game?” Davis replied to the second question in his interview session Sunday. “I appreciate you bringing that up. I appreciate it.”
Listeners laughed, and then he said, “Prior to us winning the national championship in 2017 [when Davis served as North Carolina assistant to Williams], from 1991 to 2017, I had watched that game at least once every year.”
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That’s every year, even while playing in the NBA for the Knicks, Raptors, Mavericks, Wizards, Pistons and Nets, even while life had moved on and moved on compellingly, the burn of a college loss still ransacking a professional mind.
“It’s the best team that I ever played with,” that 1990-91 team, Davis continued, “with King [Rice] and Rick [Fox] and Pete Chilcutt as the seniors and George Lynch, we were as connected as this [North Carolina] team is connected now. And we really felt like we had a chance to win the national championship, and we came up short. And that was a game that Coach Smith got two technical fouls and got kicked out, and it was an emotional game and an emotional end to a season. And playing at Carolina, the thing, for me, that I always wanted was to cut down those nets as a player. And we were so close and weren’t able to be able to have that experience. And that was the toughest loss that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”
Twenty-six years of annual torment on, in 2017, as North Carolina edged Gonzaga for Williams’s third national championship, Davis spent his fifth year as an assistant for Williams, the coach whose team had left Davis reliving agony year upon year.
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“And [I’m] thankful that I had an experience that — or an opportunity to be an assistant coach and be part of this again and to be able, as an assistant coach, be part of the championship of 2017,” Davis said, but …
“But that loss was a hard one to take.”
Then, right there on the dais of a Final Four where intimacy seldom gets a turn, he revealed one of the funny little elements of human nature that turns up around sports, something with which maybe even every fan can identify.
“No, it would make me cry,” he said of the re-watching. “And I was hoping that — it’s interesting, every time that I watched it, I would think, ‘It’s going to turn out differently.’ ”
Some laughed.
Everyone understood.
“One of the things I told the guys before we — I think it was before we came to New Orleans, I know it was during the NCAA tournament — I said the best experience is tears,” Davis said. “But I’ve told them this — the best experience that I have had as a player, hands down, was going to the Final Four. So that was a place of tears of joy but that was the best place, personally, that I had ever experienced. I told them I played 12 years in the NBA and that was my finest as a basketball player, finest moment, just being part of the Final Four.”
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In that, he conveyed the power of the event, such that maybe even a championship game between North Carolina and Kansas can matter forever even if it has to go drafting behind a semifinal between North Carolina and Duke.
Here they go, playing the thing anyway.
It’s Kansas from the quiet end of the draw, which can be a boon — “Yeah, distractions do matter,” Kansas senior Mitch Lightfoot said — and North Carolina, fresh out of the maelstrom.
“We love the quick turnaround,” Black said. “We can’t wait to play. Obviously we have to get these bodies healed in time.” Could weathering the colossus actually help, as much as harm? “It could,” Black said. “I don’t know how to answer that, but it could.”
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