This UNC Run Means Everything
For this recent grad, it's so much bigger than basketball
I had a thought on Saturday. A thought that – like so many recently uttered by Tar Heel fans – would have seemed preposterous just a couple weeks ago.
“This Carolina basketball season singlehandedly makes up for losing most of my time as a UNC student to the pandemic.”
Even as I write this, it seems a little crazy, but the more I deliberate on it, the more I believe it.
Let me back up a little bit. I’m not from here. I’m a native northerner who came of age in South Dakota and did my undergrad at the University of Minnesota. I grew up on Culver’s, not Cook Out. I’m lukewarm on J. Cole. I am not, as they say, a Tar Heel born nor a Tar Heel bred.1
Like thousands of other northerners, I moved here.2 I came down here in summer 2019 to start a two-year Master’s program at the University of North Carolina. And I loved it here from the day I arrived. I felt a sense of community I’d never experienced in my life. My new housemates and I immediately bonded like brothers and my cohort at Carolina included some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. Everything was awesome. Until it wasn’t.
You know what comes next. During spring break of my first year, COVID-19 first took a stranglehold on the United States. Everything shut down and classes hastily moved to Zoom for what most of us thought at the time would just be the rest of that semester. All the good times my classmates and I were having, stopped in their tracks. And the dynamic with the housemates shifted just a little when the four of us had differing opinions on what qualified as “taking the pandemic seriously”. Just like that, my community was gone.
I haven’t lost anyone to COVID, and for that I’m obviously extremely grateful; not everyone was so lucky. It’s still no exaggeration to say that April 2020 was by far the worst month of my life,3 a sentiment I’m sure is shared by millions. And it got worse before it got better. UNC tried to return to in-person classes for Fall 2020 and made national news for how quickly that proved to be a terrible idea. When more, even worse waves started to hit, it dawned on my classmates and I that we’d be on Zoom until we graduated.
The farther we got into the pandemic, the more I forgot what exactly I liked about this place. My distant memories of cheering on the Heels at the Dean Dome with my housemates or taking a day trip out to the mountains and hiking with my classmates were gradually replaced with pervasive thoughts about everything I hated that I still had to deal with on a daily basis.
“The summers suck! How is it 95°F with 95% humidity every day for five months straight?”
“It’s insane how sprawled out the Triangle is. It’s nearly impossible to get anywhere without a car.”4
“Why are there so many trees?” 5
Mentally, I sleepwalked through my entire second year of grad school. I became a machine programmed to wake up, drag myself to my desk for class or work or both, stay there for most of the day, and go to bed. Eventually, I’d done that enough times in a row that I got a degree out of it. I was no longer a North Carolina Tar Heel. I and most of my housemates had moved out of the place where we became friends. Many of my classmates left the state and I’m fairly certain I’ll never see some of them again.
But I’m still here. In Raleigh, which is far enough from Chapel Hill to be a different life, but close enough to drive to Kenan Stadium and watch the once-CFP-hyped6 Tar Heel football team lose to 1-4 Florida State. And despite often wanting to block most of my time at UNC out of my mind, I still watched this basketball season with utmost intensity.
I couldn’t get enough of this team, led by a first-year head coach replacing a basketball legend, which had so much talent and promise and potential, but so often pissed it all away in the biggest moments. In a sense, it felt metaphoric of my Carolina experience. I loved Minneapolis, and as I made my grad school decision, I knew any new home would have a tough time replacing it. But Chapel Hill exceeded my expectations. Until it didn’t.
So many people thought this team was headed for the NIT, and after losing to Pitt at home, it would have been tough to blame them. But that loss changed everything. Let me be clear: the titular UNC run refers to everything since that game on February 16. They smacked eventual ACC Tournament champion Virginia Tech on the road, avoided even more embarrassment against three non-playoff teams, and – last but certainly not least – punked Duke in Coach K’s last game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. They even added a drubbing of Virginia in the ACC Tournament for good measure.
And yet, heading into the NCAA Tournament as an 8-seed, it still felt like the Heels had already peaked. The Duke game was their Super Bowl and the result could ultimately end up meaningless because the 2-seed Blue Devils might just win the national championship. The Heels, on the other hand, drew Baylor – last year’s champion – in the Round of 32. And that was only if they could get past Marquette, who swept Villanova (another 2-seed) in the regular season.
Even after they thrashed Marquette by 28 points, the Baylor game still looked like the end of the line. When I met up with my old housemates to watch it at a bar, all of us expected the Bears to win a laugher. I could write 2000 words on that game alone: the insane shooting, the physical defense, and the refereeing so atrocious that it got most of the internet to sympathize with a blue blood.7 In the end, Carolina killed a giant.
The Heels lived to play another week, and as they continued to survive and advance, more and more people wanted to be in Chapel Hill to catch the action. For every game from then on, I saw more new faces coming back home from all over the region: former housemates coming down from DC, former classmates coming up from Myrtle Beach, friends of friends heading over from Charlotte. Each game, cautiously optimistic, but worried that the UNC we saw for most of the season was going to show itself at the worst possible moment. The Sweet Sixteen clash with UCLA was an emotional rollercoaster, and despite the final score, there was real concern that the Heels would lose to 15-seed Saint Peter’s in the Elite Eight.8
Of course, it all came to a head on Saturday against Duke in the Final Four. Everyone wanted to be here. Some of the faces I swore I’d never see again – I saw them! And then it hit me: it’s like nothing ever changed. The community I thought I’d lost for good was all right here, and even when it wasn’t, it never really left me. I spent Saturday night the way I spent so many others before the pandemic hit: laughing with friends from all different walks of life, connected by this one Carolina-blue thread. It sounds so cliché, but despite many of us not having seen each other in months or even years, it truly felt like we hadn’t missed a beat.
By the end of the game, I was with my former housemates9 in the living room of the house we all used to call home, where we’d watched so many Carolina basketball games before.10
A few minutes later, I was at Franklin and Columbia, soaking it all in.
Whatever happens in tonight’s game,11 I’ve already won. I may not be a Tar Heel born nor a Tar Heel bred. But after this season? When I die, I’m a Tar Heel dead.
I have, however, hated Duke for essentially my whole life as a sports fan. I’m not a psychopath.
I never officially became a resident of Minnesota (kept my South Dakota driver’s license, voter registration, etc.), so the American Community Survey’s estimation that nobody moved from South Dakota to North Carolina in 2019 is quantifiably incorrect!
And I hope that remains the case forever.
I should mention my graduate degree is in urban planning.
I drove my girlfriend crazy talking about this but I’m dead serious. You can see for dozens of miles in every direction on the Great Plains. The forest is claustrophobia-inducing in comparison.
Scientists are still trying to determine why.
I never want to see Jeremy Sochan again.
When Carolina was up by 25 with five minutes left to play, I was (rightly) scolded for complaining about how boring this game was in comparison to the rest of the Tournament.
And a couple girlfriends, including mine. Can’t forget them!
One of us still lives there.
I want the natty, don’t get it twisted.