Lucas: Our Team

By Adam Lucas

When they ask why you are the way you are, tell them about days like today.

Tell them about 93-84, sure. Tell them about Mondo's 25 and ten and five, and Harrison Ingram's five three-pointers, and RJ getting 17 on an "off" night.

But also tell them about a sellout crowd of 21,750 that rarely sat down, and the buzz on Franklin Street on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and going where you go and doing what you do and every single person walking out of the Smith Center feeling certain that somehow they, personally, had a hand in that victory.

"I don't even know," Harrison Ingram said on the Tar Heel Sports Network after the game, "how to explain this day with my words."

Days like today are how this becomes part of your life that you never want to lose. College sports is kind of a mess right now. None of that mattered for two hours on Saturday night. Carolina let Duke score the first basket, then took a 4-2 lead, and then led the entire rest of the game, a thorough, wire-to-wire win, and it was glorious.

Even when it's bad, Carolina basketball is pretty good. But when it's this good, it's so much fun and it's a huge adrenaline rush and it brings us together and it's maybe even a little bit healing, too.

It was glorious partially because of the way they did it. The Blue Devils actually defended the Tar Heels very well; they harassed Elliot Cadeau into a rough shooting night and didn't give Davis many openings. No problem. The Heels just tossed it into Bacot and watched him work, and let Ingram fire away from the perimeter, and saw Seth Trimble knife into the lane.

Think of it—Duke probably feels pretty good about the defense it played against Carolina's All-America candidate…and Carolina scored 93 points.

"In the last couple of weeks, Armando has talked about taking a backseat and this being RJ's team," Hubert Davis said on the THSN. "But this is our team. For our team to be the best it can be, we need Armando to be Armando, RJ to be RJ, Harrison to be Harrison. They were that tonight. I'm really happy for the team."

There was a play in the second half when Ingram hit a three-pointer in front of the Tar Heel bench. He virtually floated back up the court, a giant smile on his face. There is a photo of that moment at the top of this story, and every single aspect of it makes me irrationally happy. Asked about the play after the game, he said, with a giant grin, "I was lit!"

That pretty much describes the entire evening. So it was a good win. But it was better than that—it was a good day. Over the course of Saturday, I heard from the following:

A grandfather proudly showing off having taught his barely two year old granddaughter to say, "Go Tar Heels, Beat Duke."

A friend on a plane to Paris who couldn't get the TV feed of the game but figured out how to stream the Tar Heel Sports Network, and therefore was somewhere over the Atlantic while the rest of the plane tried to sleep, trying not to wake everyone up while listening to Jones and Tyler Zeller.

Brooks Reed, a Carolina student studying abroad in London, who carefully planned out a weekend trip to Madrid to link up with fellow Tar Heels to watch the game. They commandeered a Madrid bar. The sequence was perfect:

"We have amassed a group of British guys who are cheering for 'the dukes' just to make us mad," Brooks reported as the game began. "Glad to have some enemies."

And then, during the second half: "They rage quit and left the bar. The pub has converted to the Harrison Ingram fan club mixed with some euro esque house music. The Tar Heel chant is loud and clear."

Stella Smolowitz, a Carolina sophomore studying abroad in Sevilla, Spain. She had spent the week scavenging local bars and restaurants to find a place where she could watch the game with other Tar Heels. They eventually made friends with a bar owner who agreed to let her connect her laptop with a VPN to his TVs. "The bar has wifi that is decent," Stella reported, so she was able to send periodic updates.

The last text I received from her is a video. The game is over, and she and a couple dozen other Tar Heels have run out onto Calle Pablo Picasso, and they are gathered in a circle singing the alma mater and "I'm a Tar Heel Born." They are 4,000 miles from the Smith Center but they could not possibly be more right in the middle of being a Tar Heel. They will be telling this story next year at the Carolina-Duke game and in 20 years at a reunion and 40 years from now to grandchildren. The details might change, the memories might get a little fuzzy, but it will never stop being one of those indelible nights.

Around that same time, another text arrived. This one was from Brady Manek. It did not read, "Bang bang my friend," although it was an unspoken fact. He had stayed up to watch the game in Lithuania, where it was almost 4 in the morning. What he wrote was understood by everyone who has ever lived one of these games in person and also lived one from afar. It said, simply, "Having some FOMO right now!"

That's what our team does. It takes the Smith Center and Franklin Street and neutral airspace and multiple corners of Spain and Lithuania and throws us all together and gives us a common experience. Sometimes, that experience is something awful like Austin Rivers. Which only makes you appreciate even more the nights like tonight, when it's watching a team play its best game of the season in the biggest game so far of the season.

There was a great moment with six minutes left. Ingram was in the middle of one of those instant classic Carolina-Duke performances, having hit five three-pointers. But he wasn't busy looking at his stats. Instead, when Cormac Ryan missed a runner, Ingram saw the ball hit the ground and recognized Duke's Tyrese Proctor had a better play on the ball. There was only one possible way to get it—Ingram threw himself on the ground, turned his back to Proctor to prevent him from getting it, and fed Elliot Cadeau from the ground.

Cadeau swung it to RJ Davis, who immediately returned it to Ryan in the corner, where he hit a three-pointer for a 13-point lead.

Plays like that—we recognize those. That's the way our dad or our grandmother or our sister or whoever got us hooked on this drug of Carolina basketball told us the Tar Heels are supposed to play the game. That's when it feels the most like our team. This group plays basketball like Carolina is supposed to play basketball.

And look, I am capable of acknowledging that college students shooting a basketball into a hoop should not be this sublime. There are bigger issues in the world.

But sometimes we need a break from those issues. So let's just keep watching these Tar Heels play basketball, and storming Franklin Street, or Calle Pablo Picasso, or whatever is available to storm, making those memories that become lifetime stories.

"That was something else," Ingram said. "That was amazing. To play well and to get the win, all glory to my teammates."

No, Harrison. All glory to our team.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Elliot Cadeau

RJ Davis

Harrison Ingram

Cormac Ryan

Seth Trimble

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