Lucas: Head Up

By Adam Lucas

What you will hear after this game is that Carolina-Duke is always incredible, that it always delivers, that it is the unquestioned best rivalry in all of sports.

I am here to tell you that sometimes it is the worst. The worst of everything.

What makes it so maddening is that sometimes it is the best and sometimes it is the worst all in the same game. When that Dickens guy wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," I think he must have been sitting courtside at the Smith Center.

Intellectually I understand that there have to be games like this, that it is not Carolina-Duke without them, and that you have to suffer through some like this in order to be able to appreciate the inevitable victories. The fact that this series produces games like this is exactly what causes the entire sports world to stop and pay attention when Carolina-Duke happens, exactly what makes getting to be part of this twice a year so incredible.

But what I really want to do is tell my intellectual side to very kindly shut up and don't ever speak to me again. I was almost—almost—over Austin Rivers. Now this.

There was a great story waiting to be written about the first 36 minutes of this game. It was going to be a doozy. This is an actual note I wrote down: "Christian Keeling is Hubert Davis tonight." He was. He was shooting this sweet little midrange jumper, and he knocked down a three-pointer, and it was exactly the kind of unexpected offensive contribution Carolina needed to win a game like this. Andrew Platek hit a swooping, double-pump layup near halftime, then fouled out Vernon Carey by drawing a charge. Justin Pierce outhustled everyone to grab a key offensive rebound late in the second half. This stuff writes itself.

I was going to get to tell you about how at halftime I walked through a back hall of the Smith Center and came across public address announcer Tony Gilliam. Carolina was ahead by nine points at the break and he was sitting in a folding chair, completely still, all alone.

I raised an eyebrow at him. "I am afraid to say anything," he said simply. That's the kind of first half it had been. Everything had gone so well that even the man whose actual professional job is to say words, was afraid to say anything.

I would probably have told you about how it was so tense in the Smith Center that even the greatest point guard in the history of Carolina basketball, Phil Ford, couldn't watch the Tar Heels shoot free throws in the closing minute of regulation. He turned his back to the line as Carolina missed a pair of what would ultimately be crucial free throws. That's what kind of night it was. When even not watching doesn't help, what can you do?

Here are two postgame interactions that will remind you that the players you cheer for are, in many ways other than their incredible athleticism, actual humans who are not that different from us.

Joel Berry was walking out of the tunnel near the Tar Heel bench a few minutes after the game. He had a dream of a day. He saw his jersey honored in the Smith Center rafters, something he'd imagined ever since he was a little kid watching games with his parents. "That's what I was thinking about when we were out there," said his mother, Kathie. "All those games we watched when he was little, talking about how one day he would play for Carolina."

He did. And he was one of the best in the Roy Williams era, one of the toughest and the strongest and the meanest (if you were an opponent). If you were going to make a statue of Joel Berry, it would either feature him cradling the ball and roaring as Carolina clinched the 2017 national championship, or ferociously staring down Duke's Gary Trent in the 2018 ACC Tournament. That's Joel Berry. Tougher than you and me, competitive in every possible way, knows and understands the game at the highest level.

And this is what he said after watching that game.

"Free throws, man," he said. "Free throws."

That is one side of it. Free throws, man.

Then there is this other side. It is 20 minutes after the game. You were probably still staring, open-mouthed, at the television. Carolina players and coaches had retreated to the locker room, heard from Roy Williams, and then mostly just sat, stunned.

As the Tar Heels had run off the court after the game, staff member Kendall Marshall stood by the bench, repeating, "Head up," as each player ran past him. At that moment, Walker Miller had his head up. Then, after he disappeared into the hallway near the locker room, he tore his jersey cleanly in half down the middle, Hulk Hogan-style. Twenty minutes later, he had been through the anger stage and had moved on to the despondent stage. He came back up the tunnel to greet part of his family.

His mom was there. Miller was in tears, first just a couple of tears and then inconsolable tears. He had played three minutes, had fouled out Duke's Cassius Stanley, and he had made one of his two free throws. That one make came with 2:32 left in overtime in a tie game as he stepped to the free throw line with 21,500 nearly exhausted people standing in the loudest, tensest silence you will ever possibly hear.

He missed the first one, made the second. The way the night had gone, it was heroic. Thirty minutes later, you had to watch him put his hands over his face and his shoulders sag, and your heart broke again.

I wanted that badly and you wanted that badly and everyone in that building would have traded the rest of this season for just this one game, no questions asked.

He wanted it more. Sometimes even your mom can't make it better.

Let's make a pact. At some point in the next couple of years Carolina will win a game like this one. Let's remind each other to enjoy it, and remind each other not to take it for granted, and remind each other how painful it is to be on the opposite side.

And other than that, let's never speak of this again.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

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Christian Keeling

Walker Miller

Justin Pierce

Andrew Platek

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